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AMERICANS 

OF 

TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW 



BY 

ALBERT J. BEVERTDGE 

United States Senator from Indiana 

Author of 

"THE BIBLE AS GOOD READING," "WORK AND 
HABITS," ETC. 



PHILADELPHIA 

HENRY ALTEMUS COMPANY 



er; 



Copyright, 1903, by The Curtis Publishing Company 



Copyright, 1908, by Howard E. Altemus 



UBKARY of OdNuRESS, 
iwo OoDies htjceivaa 

AUG ^21 )^8 

fJ!.A5» lex. .\AC. Mj, 
JOPY 3, 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I The Dawn of a Golden Age 7 

II The Need of National Conservatism 25 

III What Shall We Do with Our Power? 47 

IV American Thoroughness 69 

V Our Place and Purpose 91 

VI The American Type 115 



THE DAWN OF A GOLDEN AGE 



AMERICANS OF TO-DAY 
AND TO-MORROW 



CHAPTER I 
The Dawn of a Golden Age 



A FINE young fellow in a Western^college, 
with that secret desire to do large things 
with his life hidden away in his breast, 
as it is in the hearts of most young Americans, 
said one day, after finishing a thesis on the great 
days of a former time in history : "Why could 
not I have lived in that day? Men did great 
things and did them well then. What sheer joy 
to be one of the people who dominate human 
events !" 

He had been studying and writing of one of 
the ruling nations of history. Another young 
fellow standing by replied : 

"That day is dawning for America. The best 
and biggest things that Rome did in her time 
and Greece and France, and later England, the 

7 



8 Americans of To-day and To-morrozv 

American people will do; and we shall do our 
work as much better than they did theirs as our 
period is in advance of theirs. This republic will 
be the determining factor in this world for cen- 
turies, never fear; and the beginning of our 
primacy in human affairs will occur during our 
lifetime. Oh, you and I live in a golden age! 
Fear not for the lack of mighty circumstances^ — 
these come in regiments and battalions, and they 
even now approach. Get ready for them — don't 
mope and become sick with regret." 

The first youth expressed the longing of every 
young American; the second, the belief of every 
vital, vigorous young American. He spoke the 
belief, too, of the American people. More than 
this, he expressed what was even then the awak- 
ening thought of the far-seeing statesmen of 
other countries, and what is now their settled 
conviction, for is not American conquest of the 
world the supreme concern of every cabinet of 
Europe? But, most of all, he spoke the truth 
of the universal situation. 

A great historian, speaking of the contradic- 
tion of English policy under Elizabeth and seek- 
ing to explain the disavowed craft of that great 



The Dazvn of a Golden Age 9 

monarch as historically negatived by her docu- 
mentary and ostensible policy, said that when she 
was compelled to play the chess game of inter- 
national politics on the board, she played it well 
to the eye of the time; but that, to the eye of 
history, she was in reality obeying the instinct 
of the British nation in the large and general cur- 
rent of the purposes, interests and destiny of her 
people. She secretly helped, for instance, the 
Dutch ''beggars of the sea," while she main- 
tained a proper governmental attitude toward 
Spain openly. That is why Elizabeth is the 
monarch of monarchs to all English hearts; she 
expressed in her real policy and deeds the in- 
stinct of the English merchant, trader, farmer — 
the instinct of the English people. This instinct 
of a people, this massed and combined intelli- 
gence of a nation, is seldom wrong. It grows 
out of their situation, of the ripeness of their 
hour in human history, of a subconsciousness of 
their strength and preparedness. And this na- 
tional instinct of a people is better evidence of 
what that instinct tells us, and of the essential 
justice and righteousness of that instinct's con- 
clusions than any individual's mere yerbal dem- 



10' Americans of To-day and To-rnorrozv 

onstration to the contrary. If the American 
people feel and belie\^e that they have now come 
to be the dominant factor in the affairs of the 
human race, that belief is better proof of that 
fact itself, and a more reliable assurance of the 
beneficence of that fact, than all the essays to 
the contrary that could be written. 

And just that is the settled conclusion of the 
twentieth-century American. 

Put the plummet of your inquiry into the depths 
of a street-car driver's intelligence and you will 
find that his profoundest belief is that Americans 
are the greatest people in the world. Make like 
experiment with the farmer boy, and you will 
find a like result. Put the test to some merchant 
who has created a business, great or small ; there, 
the same answer will speak to you. Take the 
coldest banker in the land, and you will find his 
greatest pride, exceeding the pride of gold, is 
that he is a citizen — a living part — of the domi- 
nant nation of the world. 

Take another illustration : It is a curious but 
common experience of public speakers that, 
though different arguments are needed for dif- 
ferent audiences, one familiar appeal affects all 



The Dazvn of a Golden Age ii 

American audiences alike — the appeal to them as 
citizens of the first power of the world. A polit- 
ical orator of facility and resource told me that 
while campaigning in Dakota he found restless- 
ness until he turned to the theme of the republic 
as the master nation; and the response was the 
enthusiasm of men marching to war. Con- 
versely, whoever has witnessed a banquet of 
New York bankers notes that they receive the 
wit of their speakers with cordial laughter, the 
arguments of sound economists with tolerant but 
careless assent, and everything with a lukewarm 
indifference, until some trumpet voice sounds the 
note of American supremacy; and then the ob- 
server always beholds those men, in whom the 
countinghouse is popularly supposed to have at- 
rophied patriotism, spring to their feet like 
schoolboys and cheer like soldiers on the charge. 
This same phenomenon of an almost religious 
faith in America's permanent destiny, manifested 
in equal fervor in the most widely different types 
of communities and the most utterly unlike char- 
acters, reveals a profound truth — the truth of 
our national instinct that we are to be supreme 
and that our supremacy is already beginning. 



12 Americans of To-day and To-niorrow 

This faith is not only the largest element in 
its accomplishment, but it is of practical and tan- 
gible value to every young American in his daily 
life and personal career. 

Let us see whether this is merely the vainglory 
of national enthusiasm or whether the realities 
justify it. Let us imagine ourselves impartial 
observers, from some far height, of the rolling 
world below. The first thing we shall note is 
comparative national locations. England, so su- 
perbly located for insular security and maritime 
dominance when the affairs of civilization were 
confined to Europe, we now see disadvanta- 
geously located when those affairs are broad- 
ened over all the oceans and touch the shores of 
all the continents. No matter how splendid her 
work in the past, we are now talking of situa- 
tion with reference to the present. Then we see 
France literally wedged in between Germany and 
Spain. It was a fine position when the Mediter- 
ranean was still the center of human action. 
And the position of Italy at a like period was 
superb. But with the great past of Italy and 
France w^e have nothing now to do; we are 
studying present conditions. And, topographic- 



Tlic Dazvn of a Golden Age 13 

ally speaking, their respective locations are not 
important from the twentieth-century point of 
view. Germany we observe as a curious and 
limited coloring of the world's map, without ad- 
vantage in position, embarrassed by immediate 
propinquity to hostile neighbors. The amazing 
vitality of the people who live in this httle land; 
their wonderful organization of activities, com- 
mercial, scientific, military, maritime; the soul 
of their great emperor, which seems to gather 
strength from every subject and radiate that 
strength again to his people in vivifying streams 
of national hope and achievement — all these are 
matters of present and immediate concern; but 
these we must take account of presently. Let us 
now confine ourselves to geography. Viewing 
merely situation, then, Germany is not formid- 
able. For present purposes neither is Russia, al- 
though the certainties of her future expansion 
will, in the sweep of the centuries, make her lo- 
cation perhaps the most advantageous of all. 
Now compare the location of the American 
republic. 

First of all, it is imperial in size. You can 
put all of Great Britain down in any one of sev- 



14 Americans of To-day and To-morrozv 

era] of its states. The same is true of Germany 
or France or any other power in the world, ex- 
cepting only Russia. The first thing, then, that 
compels attention is the immensity of the Ameri- 
can republic's dimensions. 

It is imperially bounded, also. On the east is 
one of the world's greatest oceans; on the west 
is the other of the world's greatest oceans; on 
the south is the world's greatest gulf; on its 
north are the world's greatest lakes. Through its 
center runs the world's greatest river; in its west 
are ,the world's greatest mountains, heavy with 
the world's richest mines. You will say at the 
first glance that here is a land designed by Nature 
for separate development, disconnected from the 
rest of the human world and untroubled with 
external affairs. Here, you will say at the first 
glance, is a location which compels the nation 
which occupies it to be an inland people. 

Yes ! But at second glance you will say the 
reverse. For look at its coast line. And then 
look at the coast line of the other five greatest 
maritime nations. The coast line of the republic 
alone exceeds the coast lines of the other five put 
together. And its harbors — look at them; more 



The Dawn of a Golden Age 15 

in number than those of any other two maritime 
nations and unsurpassed in excellence on any 
shores of any seas. And behold, now, how cun- 
ningly the Master Contriver has placed these 
American harbors. Their locations are nothing 
short of triumphs of commercial and military 
strategy. New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, 
Charleston, Boston, Mobile, New Orleans and all 
the harbors of the Gulf, San Francisco and the 
harbors of the Pacific — an impressive chain of 
ports, is it not? Harbors looking out upon 
Europe and inviting Europe; harbors looking 
out upon the Caribbean waters and the countries 
of South America and inviting them ; harbors 
looking out upon the Pacific and the countries of 
the Orient and inviting them. Now consider 
ocean channels and currents; and then observe 
the nicety with which the republic's sea doors are 
located with reference to these ; and, to sum up 
the whole situation, that man's reason is palsied 
who denies the conclusions of this syllogism of 
Nature. 

A land capable of supporting a people defended 
from the rest of the world so long as they choose, 
its location is calculated to lead that people out 



1 6 Americans of To-day and To-morroiv 

over the world whenever they will. And so we 
see that in point of situation the country over 
which floats the Stars and Stripes is perfectly 
placed not only for self-development but for 
world dominance. Immeasurable as Nature has 
made its inland opportunities, Nature has re- 
peated and even magnified its ocean possibilities. 
And the observer, looking down as the globe rolls 
beneath him, says, ''In point of location and op- 
portunities springing out of mere situation, this 
land, of all lands, is the chosen one of fortune." 

And so the young American's sublime faith in 
his country's future springs, first of all, out of 
comparative geography. "Why, look where I 
live !" says the young American of to-day. ''My 
home is on the very throne of thing^s. If my 
nation is not the master of the world's circum- 
stances, it certainly is not the fault of the repub- 
lic's location. Whose fault will it be, then, should 
such mastery not come to us ? My fault and mine 
only. And my fault it shall not be. I will be 
worthy, as one citizen, of our opportunity — an 
opportunity so vast that it is difficult to compre- 
hend." 

So, I take it, speaks every young American's 



The Daivn of a Golden Age 17 

heart to him; and in obedience to that voice he 
will find an inspiration, even for his individual 
career, which will make that career as large in 
proportion as his country's situation in the world; 
and an inspiration which will glorify that career 
with an ideal more exalted than any yet given to 
man. 

An acute young American talking with a com- 
panion on this very theme said, "Quite true, 
splendidly true ; but yet there is in it an element 
of national egotism which repels." ''No, not 
egotism," said his companion. ''It passes that; 
it reaches the plane of exaltation; it is a phase 
of faith which has in it something of the divine. 
No one calls our belief that we are the children 
of a universal God — the highest conception yet 
developed by human thought — no one calls that 
egotism. And this conception of our national 
dominance is nearly akin to that. But whatever 
it is, it is a fact, and that is the chief thing — ■ 
the largest fact in contemporary human circum- 
stance." 

Of course location is not all. Resources are 
even more important. They are not to be ex- 

2—Atn. T. T. 



1 8 Americans of To-day and To-morrozv 

tensively reviewed here; only attention is called 
to them. The purpose is to acquaint the young 
American with, the tangible foundations of his 
faith in his country and its future ; for that faith 
is and will be his highest inspiration to personal 
effort. The purpose is to make him familiar with 
the elements of power everywhere around him, 
which he can and must forge into an irresistible 
individual career. And as our country's regal 
position among the nations rouses pride in the 
young American's breast, so each young Ameri- 
can thus making the very most of his individual 
career renders certain that national greatness the 
dream of which is the motive power of his effort. 
'T admire your country, but I admire your 
people less," said a young German in Berlin one 
night, a young man already marked as certain to 
be a large figure in future German statesmanship. 
He spoke with that frankness which is a singular 
and common characteristic of all essentially great 
men. It was a statement so at variance with the 
stereotyped phrase of foreign laudation when 
speaking to an American of the American people, 
that it was worth following up. So it was fol- 
lowed up. 



The Dazvn of a Golden Age 19 

''I mean this," he said. "Your country has a 
situation in the world to which our German loca- 
tion is insignificant; you have resources to which 
our German resources are just nothing at all. 
Between German resources and American re- 
sources there is no comparison — only glaring 
contrast. Yet we compete with you in the mar- 
kets of the world. We are rapidly passing you 
as a maritime power. We are al)le to do this 
because every bit of our energy is carefully organ- 
ized. None goes to waste. Every ounce of 
muscle, every volt of nerve and brain power is 
devoted to specific ends along lines of least 
resistance. 

"On the contrary, much as you boast of your 
organization you do not organize at all. What 
success you have is due to the incomparable rich- 
ness of your country and to the sheer strength 
of your people. You waste, waste, waste — every- 
where you waste. You waste energy; you waste 
resources; you scatter in effort. Take a familiar 
illustration — the trees out there in the street sug- 
gest one. We make land otherwise absolutely 
Vv^orthless pay enormously by scientific forestry; 
you cut your forests down like vandals in order 



20 Americans of To-day and To-morrozv 

that a few men may get rich in a few years. Thus 
a great source of what should be perpetual wealth 
is lost to you; your streams are dried up and 
your country loses incalculable millions by an al- 
most barbarous lack of sensible management. 
Your activity is not the development of resources ; 
it is the destruction of resources. With us it is 
the contrarv^ Our resources are small, as I have 
said, but they are conserved, nourished, made the 
most of; and, though they yield hundreds and 
even thousands of per cent, more in proportion 
than yours do, instead of diminishing them we 
increase them." 

That conversation was better than the reading 
of many volumes, and pointed out an undoubted 
weakness in our individual and national method; 
but it admitted — and that is The purpose of re- 
producing it here — the incomparable magnitude 
of our national wealth. 

It is useless to give the figures. The statistics 
of our agricultural products, of our mineral out- 
put, of our manufacturing industry more than 
amaze us. They simply stun the intellect; the 
understanding is paralyzed in its attempt to grasp 
them. 



The Dazvn of a Golden Age 21 

The point is that the young American finds 
himself in a country unrivaled in its world loca- 
tion; but also he finds himself surrounded by 
multitudinous resources so great that no mind 
has grasped their immensity. These are his tools ; 
these are his commission, direct from Nature her- 
self, appointing him the master craftsman in 
human affairs now and for some centuries to 
come. And it is these which command him to 
be as large and as hopeful and as conqueringly 
vigorous in his personal life as are the elements 
of greatness with which fortune has endowed his 
countr}^ Optimism is too poor a word for what 
ought to be the attitude of the young American's 
mind. That which in the citizen of another coun- 
try would be neurotic exaltation is, to the young 
American, only the normal — and the only nor- 
mal — state of his intellect and aspiration. 



THE NEED OF NATIONAL 
CONSERVATISM 



CHAPTER II 
The Need of National Conservatism 



THE American of to-day is, first of all, the 
possessor of strength — fortune in loca- 
tion, opulence in resources. He has an 
advantage in all the natural elements which 
makes men of other lands almost beggars in 
comparison. He is a very lord of power. But 
it is a strange fact that the possessor of great 
power is apt to use it riotously. Youth throws 
away life as though youth were a millionaire 
of vitality. Perhaps this is the working out 
of some deep law of equilibrium, which, after 
all, will not let strength become too strong. 
That we Americans have been using the great 
bank account which Nature put to our credit 
with the recklessness of a spendthrift, the deep 
criticism of the young German in the first chapter 
demonstrates ; and the observation of all thought- 
ful people confirms it. And so it is that, as 
pointed out, Germany, with puny resources, is 
able to compete with us on the high seas and in 
25 



26 Americans of To-day and To-inorrozv 

the markets of the world. She does this by 
organization — by the careful conservation of what 
she has. In the last five years the papers have 
been filled with despatches reciting afresh what 
careful students have known for the last ten years, 
that we are in actual danger from German rivalry. 
It is a very poor thing, to get angry with Ger- 
many on that account; rather, we should respect 
her. Respect her and also learn a lesson from 
her — a lesson which England would have done 
well to learn when Mr. Williams, many years 
ago, brought out his remarkable book, "Made 
in Germany." And that lesson is the combined 
lesson of conservation of our resources and or- 
ganization of our energies. Henceforth this 
must be the dominant note in American national 
policy and in the personal conduct of each Ameri- 
can. Conscrv-2ition — that is, the husbanding of 
all of our strength and all of our resources, and 
the spending of them wisely to good and effective 
uses. 

There is one characteristic which I am sure 
every person who has thought deeply and long 
over the make-up of the American mind and dis- 
position will agree is, and will always be, the sav- 



The Need of National Conservatism 27 

ing American grace, and that is the virtue of 
adaptabiUty. We encounter a new and perfectly 
unfamihar situation : we do not attempt to bend 
that situation to preconceived notions. We sim- 
ply adapt ourselves to it and solve its difficulties 
according to the wisdom of the event. Indeed, 
it may welt be said that the American character- 
istic is adaptability. Recognizing, then, our ad- 
vantage over the remainder of the world in all 
that makes for national power and, therefore, for 
individual success; recognizing, too, the gigantic 
wastefulness of our past methods, the American 
of to-day realizes also that for the nation at 
large and for each citizen thereof a cautious 
conservatism is the duty of the hour and of 
the country. I cannot get out of my mind the 
remark of the Japanese statesman who said, 
''We hope to prevail in the war with Russia 
because small resources well organized are 
more powerful than great resources poorly organ- 
ized." How his hope was justified all the world 
knows. 

With the American's adaptability, with his love 
of and insistence upon absolute truth, his demand 
to know just how his account stands so that he 



28 Americans of To-day and To-morroiu 

may work according to it, it is a fair conclusion 
that the young American of tlie twentieth cen- 
tury will make himself, first of all, a conservative 
man. There is nothing worse for any of us, noth- 
ing worse for a nation, than to run after every 
hue and cry that is raised, simply because the 
hue and cry is novel and appears attractive. We 
must remember that nine tenths of all proposi- 
tions advanced are unsound. It is useful to re- 
flect upon the records of the Patent Office. Tens 
of thousands of inventions prove of no practical 
moment. It is not meant by this that we should 
not have hospitality for new ideas. It is meant 
merely that we should make it the habit of our 
lives to apply cold common sense to our enthu- 
siasms. 

This may take out of our effort some of its 
clan, but it will add to it a steadiness of purpose 
better than any dash. A French soldier of 
Napoleon declared that ''in the attack French- 
men were incomparably strong — in defeat they 
were childishly weak; whereas the stolid steadi- 
ness of the English was even more admirable 
when they were beaten than when they were 
victorious." 



The Need of National Conservatism 29 

The American of the twentieth century will 
surely see this — sees it now. He says to 
himself as he rises in the morning, "My 
watchword for this day is 'steadiness and poise.' " 
He declares : 'T do not propose to hurn my ener- 
gies up agitating for this ism or that ism. I do 
not propose to scatter my strength fighting for 
verbal 'rights' which I am told belong to me. I 
mean that my work shall be for substantial ends." 
And so he introduces into his life the rule of 
the three modern graces — steadiness, system, 
conservatism. 

It is a thing for us Americans to think about, 
and think about very solidly and very earnestly. 
Other people will think about it if we do not — 
do think about it whether we do or not, and act 
on their thought. It is a fine thing to know just 
what criticisms your rivals make of you; they 
are probably sound. And instead of avoiding 
them one should get hold of them, if one can, 
and profit by them prayerfully. 

'T find," said a foreign statesman to an 
American gentleman in the course of a very 
frank interchange of mutual criticisms on the 
modern method and conduct of their respective 



30' Americans of To-day and To-nwirozv 

people, "that you Americans contend too much 
among yourselves; you waste infinite energy 
battling against one another. It is a good thing 
for us. We see our chance. And while you are 
getting what you call 'rights' from one another 
we get with our comparatively very insignificant 
strength much of the fruit which you yourselves 
might gather for the prosperity of your whole 
country and the individual happiness of all your 
citizens." 

That was a deep remark, was it not? For do 
we not find labor and capital in warfare among 
our very selves? These conflicts, of course, hap- 
pily are growing less. The hopeful lover of the 
American people cannot but console himself with 
the thought that ultimately they will disappear 
altogether. The American who is developing 
to-day in all ranks of life is a man upon whose 
mind the great truth is gradually but surely 
dawning that the good of each of us is the good 
of all of us; that there are no separate ''rights" 
of any separate class against another ; no "du- 
ties" of any class due to another; but that the 
happiness and the welfare of all of us are to be 
found only in a hard-headed, unselfish (although, 



TJie Need of National Conservatism 31 

deeply considered, most selfish) consideration of 
what is best for the whole country. 

Many years ago the industrial classes in Eng- 
land began quarreling among themselves. Labor 
wanted many things. Its demands were made 
with impatient impulsiveness. The manufactur- 
ers, the business men, the capitalists resisted with 
no large wisdom of method or manner — resisted, 
indeed, with folly and bullheadedness. There 
was no conciliation, no getting together, no 
wholesome reasonableness. Meanwhile, in Ger- 
many — polytechnic schools, patient steadiness in 
industry, saving and creative methods in capital, 
the slow, sure acquirement of skill and effective- 
ness. The result is that Eng'lish labor has be- 
come unskilled in comparison with the labor of 
her continental rivals; that English capital has 
become impotent and nerveless in comparison 
with the watchful, confident and aggressive cap- 
ital of her industrial enemies across the channel; 
and that English business houses are beginning 
to find themselves without business and English 
labor is beginning to find itself without employ- 
ment. And when this process shall have been 
completed, when breadless women and children, 



32 Americans of To-day and To-morrow 

and men without work shall howl in the streets 
of London, Birmingham, Manchester and Liver- 
pool, what a spectacle then will the contentions 
between labor and capital present which have 
torn industrial and commercial England for a 
quarter of a century? How much lovelier a 
picture would conciliation and mutual under- 
standing and sane confidence in each other have 
presented ! And how immeasurably better for 
English prosperity! With this object lesson be- 
ing worked out before our very eyes the Ameri- 
can of to-day is not liable to fall into the same 
abysmal error. Shall we not, rather, cease con- 
tending among ourselves and unitedly contend 
with the world ? It would be a sorry picture we 
should make (with our puissance, our intelli- 
gence, our acuteness) if we should find ourselves 
fighting with one another over a division of 
spoils which our rivals, during our contention 
among ourselves, had captured. And so it ap- 
pears that the word of truth which will be in the 
mouths of all Americans from the dawn of the 
twentieth century will be conservatism in method 
and cooperation and forbearance in thought and 
action. 



J 



The Need of National Conservatism 33 

All who have reached mature years have ob- 
served that mere precept and counsel bear small 
results. At best they produce only occasional 
and spasmodic good. This chapter is intended 
to show young Americans that conservatism and 
steadiness in individual and national American 
character necessarily grow out of the situation in 
which the nation finds itself. The saving period 
— the saving of energy and resources — is now 
as inevitable as the wasting period now past, or 
at least passing, was natural. And if each Ameri- 
can sees that this is so he will himself make daily 
effort that these elements of character shall be 
the dominant ones in him. For if this is the 
order of our time, if this is the necessity of our 
circumstance, then each one of us will get him- 
self into line and harmony with this system of 
things. Otherwise, each one of us will find him- 
self working at cross-purposes with the course 
of events. Usefulness, success, satisfying frui- 
tion of all our work are possible only when our 
work is in harmony with the general sweep of 
human activities. And this orderly on-going of 
the affairs of peoples is fixed and determined by 
natural conditions. What I am attempting to 

3— Am. T. T. • 



34 Americans of To-day and To-morroiv 

show is that these natural conditions require a 
levelness and cHscretion of thought and action in 
American character. 

Let the young American ponder this well, and 
he will see that rashness of scheme and hot- 
headedness of action and recklessness of method 
cannot possibly bring him any ultimate good. 
They are as much "out of gear" with what our 
internal relationships with one another and our 
general attitude toward the world at large re- 
quire of us as the conduct of the highwayman 
and the forger is antagonistic to the whole 
scheme of human society. Did you ever think 
why it is that crime cannot possibly be successful, 
no matter how able the criminal? It is because 
the criminal is fighting every settled method of 
the world. Every device of business becomes a 
detective ; and the criminal's operations are in 
conflict with the whole course of the daily life 
of eighty millions of our people — of all people. 
Let him take precautions never so cunningly, the 
criminal finds his maturest plans utterly irra- 
tional. For precisely the same reasons the meth- 
ods of mere dash are irrational and out of date. 
The systematic, the considerate, the orderly, the 



The Need of National Conservatism 35 

conservative — these are the qualities of character 
which our situation in the world and the present 
state of our development absolutely require of all 
Americans. And therefore the type of Ameri- 
can now developing, and even this moment al- 
ready to the front, is the coolest, steadiest, most 
thoughtful and practical character which the race 
has yet produced — a man with daring, but the 
daring of forethought ; with energy, but the con- 
tinuous energy of purpose ; with effectiveness, 
not spasmodic and instantaneous, but the resist- 
less effectiveness of well-considered and mod- 
erate plan. 

Although oratory in the old sense of that word 
is dying out (and an excellent good thing it is), 
plain speech to the people is increasing in its 
power and in its results. The political platform 
is the best place to observe the growth of the 
very elements set down above as the natural and 
requisite qualities of American character. In a 
central western state during a recent political 
campaign an "orator" of attractiveness and pic- 
turesque quality was addressing a large crowd 
made up principally of farmers. Two gentlemen 
— students always and everywhere of American 



36 Americans of To-day and To-morrozv 

tendencies — from the edge of the crowd ob- 
served that the audience rapidly melted away. 
''It is easy to see why," remarked one. ''He is 
appealing to men's passions on unsubstantial 
grounds; he is announcing propositions attract- 
ive on the surface and at the moment of utter- 
ance, but harebrained to the thoughtful. And 
these people are thoughtful. Rural free delivery 
gives them their daily papers. Their informa- 
tion is as good as the speaker's, and they have 
acquired that quickness of mental habit charac- 
teristic of our rapid age; also, their instinct of 
soundness is developing astonishingly. So they 
will not listen to this engaging speaker. What 
he says offends a sort of conscientiousness of 
logic in them. They feel that their own capac- 
ity for thought and truth is being trifled with." 
A week later practically the same audience as- 
sembled to listen to another speaker. He spoke 
boldly, announcing propositions which the old- 
time player on public passions would have de- 
clared surely indiscreet and certainly unpopular. 
But he spoke most reasonably and, above all 
things, most frankly. Instead of diminishing, his 
audience constantlv increased. Nothing in the 



The Need of National Conservatism 2^7 

world attracted them and held them but the sub- 
stantial reasonableness and conservatism of his 
utterance. 

These two illustrations show how the solid and 
moderate are developing among the great mass 
and body of American citizenship. They are 
sidelights revealing an explanation of the tri- 
umph of the conservative cause in our fiercest 
political battles. Let the young politician who 
hopes for permanent and enduring success bear 
in mind that the age of claptrap in our political 
affairs has passed. He may catch the ''ground- 
lings" with it, but he will "make the judicious 
grieve." And the "judicious" are a majority 
among Americans, and a steadily augmenting 
majority. 

"I too am not a bit tamed, . . . 
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world,'' 

exclaimed Walt Whitman. And when he said it 
a lot of literary gentlemen who knew nothing 
of the American people wrote beautiful essays 
about Whitman's being "the untamed soul of 
our Western democracy." He was nothing of 
the kind. The chief note in Whitman's unruled 



38 Ainericans of To-day and To-morrow 

and unruly verse is as abhorrent to, and out of 
harmony with, American character as the war 
whoop of those savages whom our industry and 
civilization displaced. 

Akin to this false note of Whitman are the 
shaggy and eccentric cries tha-t we hear with de- 
creasing frequency in the political campaigns. 
Even powerful party leaders still indulge in 
unrestrained utterance concerning the ''down- 
trodden people," and ''the majesty of the peo- 
ple," and "the will of the people," and other 
familiar catchwords of the demagogue. They 
do not mean these weighty words in their true 
sense. They mean them in the Whitman sense. 
They use them improperly and passionately to in- 
tluence the popular mind. The will of the people 
is indeed the noblest thing on this earth. The 
common thought of the instructed masses must 
in the end necessarily be the largest human wis- 
dom. But the will of the people is no spasmodic 
affair. It is the powerful and prudent conclu- 
sions of our eighty millions pouring in steady 
and continuous stream through the years. It is 
not a thing to be trifled with or played upon. 
And he who takes some gust of popular passion, 



TJie Need of National Conservatism 39 

conspicuous for a day but disappearing to-mor- 
row and regretted the day after, as the evidence 
of popular desire, and "plays to" it or plays upon 
it, not only does not understand American char- 
acter, but misuses, misinterprets and insults it. 

How comports this theory of caution with the 
doctrine of masterfulness of the first chapter? 
''It is a philosophy of contradictions you hold," 
said a talented woman in a company of conver- 
sation one evening". She was responding to an- 
other who had given voice to something of the 
same general tenor as this book. (And how the 
drift of conversation shows the common thought 
running through the common mind of the peo- 
ple!) ''No, not contradictions, but consist- 
encies," said a third member of the company ; 
"for the very excess of vigor which we Ameri- 
cans possess implies the necessity for regularity 
and wise direction in its exercise." 

It is related of James H. Hyde, who founded 
the Ecjuitable Assurance Society on nothing but 
this rational plan and unconquerable energy, that 
he said to a young man (also of great power) 
of a rival company : "You remind me of my 
own younger days. It seems to me that the 



40 Americans of To-day and To-morrozv 

young New Yorker of to-day says of a task : 
'This takes ten pounds of energy. Very well; I 
will give it ten pounds and not a pennyweight 
more.' When I was founding this institution 
I said to myself: 'Here is a plan; its execution 
requires ten pounds of energy. Very well; here 
goes for a hundred.' And I gave it a hundred; 
hut I was very sure that it zvas a plan zvorth 
giving a single ounce of energy to:' That was a 
thoroughly American utterance. The point is 
that we must not waste our energies on unsub- 
stantial projects. We must choose our course 
with care; but, having chosen it and considered 
it, then we must be no miser in the application 
of our strength to pursuing that course to its 
triumphant end. And all of our energy and re- 
sources are for use, not for mere hoarding. But 
in the uses to which we devote them there must 
be forethought and deliberate choosing. 

Careful experience for several years in a seri- 
ous legislative body like the Senate quickens the 
faculties of alertness and judgment. A wise 
Senator remarked one day : "Have you ever 
observed the ponderous magnitude of Ijills and 
resolutions which are introduced only to die? 



The Need of National Conservatism 41 

Have you observed, too, that many that survive 
the committee and are pushed with vigor go 
nevertheless to a certain death? Let me teh you 
it is because they are not well worked out in ad- 
vance. Even when they are well worked out as 
separate propositions, they are not carefully con- 
sidered in their relation to the whole body of 
our laws and the established order into which 
they must go, if enacted into law, and work in 
unison and harmony. The passion for achieve- 
ment, the desire to 'do things,' is all right, excel- 
lent, indeed ; but it should be guided by thought 
and preparation. Achievement is mischievous 
unless it is effective, unless it works for the 
good of the great body of our people and the 
general betterment of the whole assemblage of 
our laws. So all of the brain power and nervous 
energy spent in concocting these impracticable 
measures is lost both to the man who conceives 
them and to the people he serves. If such men 
would only patiently wait and carefully study, 
and then after consultation work with others, 
contributing all of their energy to a common ef- 
fort for the enactment of wise measures or the 
prevention of unsound policies, the nation would 



42 Americans of To-day and To-nwrrozv 

be served and the usefulness of these men who 
now waste their talents would be increased quite 
beyond calculation." 

This observation of a conscientious legislator 
is worth reproduction here ; and it is worth, too, 
the thoughtful meditation of every young Ameri- 
can who would grasp that truth most needed at 
this hour and in the future by all Americans. 
After all, it was only a diluted form of that 
wisest pronouncement of that wise man, Paul 
— 'Trove all things; hold fast that which is 
good." 

I am not counseling timidity either of plan or 
of • action on the part of Americans of to-day ; 
I am pointing out merely how absolutely essen- 
tial it is that the American of the twentieth cen- 
tury shall regulate his vigor and make himself 
the master of his own masterfulness. I would 
have him the director of his energies, and not 
their slave. Let the American pour the tremen- 
dous power of his strength and his resources 
toward the accomplishment of great and worthy 
purposes. Let him not waste and dissipate his 
noble advantages, which, well conserved, well 
used and well directed, render him the very 



The Need of National Conservatism 43 

monarch of the world's destinies, now and far 
into a future so briUiant that it is dazzling. 

There is no danger in pointing out that the 
very magnificence of our power, our location, our 
resources compels conservatism to be the domi- 
nant trait of the twentieth-century American. 

Let no one fear that the enthusiasm of Ameri- 
can youth will thereby be harmfully repressed. 
If every preacher in America were to make con- 
servatism the text of all his sermons for the next 
decade, and every platform speaker were to do 
the same, and all the editors were to make that 
word the theme of all their editorials — even if 
every mother were to teach her children, not the 
gospel of mere effort but of thoughtfulness and 
thoroughness, there would still be no danger that 
the American character would be unduly toned 
down. For, after all, there is something about 
us that is abnormally energetic. 

''Pardon me," said a Russian of world travel 
and experience, ''but the soberest of Americans 
seem to me to be intoxicated." 

Observing the immense cjuantit}^ of spirits 
which Englishmen — and of the better class, too 
— consume with apparently no effect, the ques- 



44 Americans of To-day and To-niorrozv 

tion was put to an Englishman of letters who 
was also an English statesman of large reputa- 
tion : ''How can you Englishmen drink so much? 
If Americans drank only a small portion of the 
liquor you consume they would be intoxicated." 
"I think it must be the difference in our climate, 
for Americans seem to us constitutionally intoxi- 
cated. It appears to us that you have not the 
power of repose. I have observed your people 
closely in every section of your own country, 
and it is very rare when I find one who has time 
to think." 

Whatever an Englishman says, a Russian will 
always say the reverse ; and whatever a Russian 
says an Englishman will say is quite the contrary 
of the truth. Yet here were two eminent and 
observant men making a common statement in 
almost the same terms. 



WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH 
OUR POWER? 



CHAPTER III 
What Shall We Do with Our Power? 



4<TT THAT is the secret of your power?" said 

VV ^^^^ ^^ those who sat by the bedside 
of the dying Richeheii. 'Tell us, that 
we may continue your work for the good of 
France." 

And the dying statesman-soldier-priest an- 
swered : "Some say it is courage — that I am a 
lion ; some say it is craft — that I am a fox. It 
is neither. It is justice." 

So runs the noble anecdote. Doubtless it is 
not true as a literal fact, but it ought to be true; 
therefore, for the purposes of human instruction 
it is true. Every man of sensibility occasionally 
finds a story which so interprets man and the 
world to him that henceforth it becomes a part 
of his character. 

Such a tale is the legend of Richelieu. Apply 
it to the republic. Justice! This nation must 
be just. My first chapter was designed to show 
our power, growing out of our location on the 

47 



48 Americans of To-day and To-morrow 

map of the world and the resources within us; 
the second attempted to show that out of the ele- 
ments of our very being springs our first national 
and individual necessity of character, to wit, the 
necessity of conservatism, moderation, thoughtful 
poise. This chapter is to demonstrate that this 
power, which is unrivaled in the world if well con- 
served, must pass all other human influences and 
is worth while only when used justly. 

And if the nation must be just in its dealings 
with the world, its citizens must be just. Why? 
Because no citizen of the republic can dissociate 
himself from the nation. The nation's necessities 
are his necessities; the nation's characteristics, 
his characteristics; the nation's opportunities, his 
opportunities; weightier than all, the nation's 
duties are his duties. Duty is a great word. It 
is a greater word than the word Wealth ; greater 
than the words, Money, Power, Glory, Domi- 
nance. It is the word which makes all the other 
words worth while. No sane man, no lover of 
his kind, no gentle man, can tolerate mere 
strength which is not directed to high purposes. 
Every one of us dislikes cant and all hypocrisy. 
Pretense of high purposes, which we know very 



What Shall We Do zvith Our Powerf 49 

well are not in the heart of the man who pro- 
fesses them, is repellent. But every one of us 
uncovers before the man whom in our very be- 
ing we know to be both powerful and just. This 
is true even when such a man is a bitter personal 
enemy. *'I hate him, but I must follow him. 
I cannot help it," exclaimed a local politician of 
a political leader whose boldness and forgetful- 
ness of self in a great emergency had chained the 
attention of a state. 'T must follow him — 
because he has been just." And so the ward poli- 
tician of an American town repeated in substance 
the dying words of France's most accomplished 
statesman. 

Our critics assert that we are defective in art 
and the graces of life, but admit our power. In 
sheer might we are a Berserker people. Very 
well ! What are we going to do with that power ? 
We are going to conserve it, save it, regulate 
it, of course. But what for? To get fat upon? 
No ! Merely to vaunt ourselves ? No ! To flaunt 
our flag before the world ? No ! To have it said 
of us that we are "unrivaled" or any other word 
of vainglory ? No ! What is all this power and 
wealth and domination for, then? Let any 

4— Am. T. T. 



50 Americans of To-day and To-morrow 

American search his soul and he will answer: 
"For righteousness — for justice — for the good of 
the world." 

So we see that justice to other peoples (and 
therefore justice among ourselves) is the second 
element of national (and therefore individual) 
character which this nation must possess. 

We are "up against" all other nations — "up 
against" the world. (Let us not disdain our 
vernacular — the phrase of the "man in the street" 
— and therefore let us say "up against.") It is 
neither our merit nor our fault that this is so. 
Progress has made it so. Ocean greyhounds 
have made it so. The cable has made it so. The 
wireless message has made it even more so. If 
Lettre said a century ago that "the globe is a 
very inferior planet," what would he say to-day? 
Whether we will or no, we are mixed up in the 
world's controversies. So, to-day, is every na- 
tion. We cannot keep to ourselves if we would. 
It is useless to argue whether this is bad or good. 
It is so. 

Consider an analogy. There was a certain 
tragedy recently. The press carried its details in 
full. One cannot help but think that such adver- 



What Shall We Do with Our Poiverf 51 

tisement of wickedness is a bad thing. But what 
is the use of morahzing? The press spread the 
news because the nation was interested; the na- 
tion was interested because to-day the nation is 
a family; and the press is the national family 
gossip. The telegraph, the telephone, the electric 
railway, rural free delivery, everything has made 
the American people a single community. A 
town in Iowa is now a suburb of New York. 
Crawfordsville, Ind., knows all about Boston. 
What happens in New Orleans happens in 
Chicago so far as the knowledge of the event is 
concerned. In the same way the American re- 
public is a member of the family of nations — a 
controlling member and destined to be more so. 
Preach against it as you will, the fact remains. 
Having this condition, therefore, what is to be 
done? Justice is to be done. Righteousness is 
to be done. High purposes are to be accom- 
plished. It is not cant to insist that we are agents 
of divine purposes. 

The hand that rounded Peter's dome 
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome 
Wrought in a sad sincerity ; 
Himself from God he could not free. 



52 Americans of To-day and To-morrow 

So wrote Emerson. And he wrote truly of the 
artist. Did he not also write truly of this nation ? 
What American has not entertained from his 
youth the dream that this nation shall be the 
arbiter of the destinies of the world? But the 
arbiter for what ends ? Let us survive in history, 
at least, and in ideals wrought into deeds; for 
we shall surely have a physical ending (perhaps 
hundreds of years away, but none the less we 
cannot hope to escape the universal law of dis- 
solution). A nobler race than ours will take our 
place. But let us be the noblest thus far evolved. 
Let us live up to our possibilities. Our possi- 
bilities ! No contemporary mind can grasp them. 
The mind of the future will grasp them, but not 
the mind of the present. The mind which the 
world will produce a thousand years from now 
will consider our work and problems very easy 
to do and very easy to solve, just as we now 
consider the conditions of medieval times almost 
absurd in their simplicity. Let us show history, 
then, that we lived up to the best that w^as within 
us. Let us show the future that we Americans 
were the best possible product of our times. We 
shall do all this if history writes of us: 'The 



JFhat Shall JVe Do zcifh Our Power? 53 

American people in . their time were known of 
all men as 'the just nation.' " 

We all read the Bible. Why do we read it? 
Because those ancient Hebrews (say what you 
will against them) gave the world moral ideas. 
They gave us those moral ideas along with crude- 
ness and cruelty of conduct, it is true; but we 
forget the barbarity and we make the moral ideas 
our ideals and try to live up to them. The point 
is that truth, the loftiest views, genuine brother- 
hood are the only things worth while. And who 
would confine brotherhood to locality? It is "a 
contradiction in terms," as the logicians say, is 
it not? And if so, let us expand our thought 
and then ask : Who would confine brotherhood 
to boundaries — to nations? 

By a chain of the logic of events, so strong 
that the wisest cannot account for it except upon 
the hypothesis of a divine wisdom which con- 
founds statesmen, we have many world problems 
on our hands. How are we going to solve them ? 
For the good of ourselves? Certainly. The in- 
stinct of self-interest which is ineradicable settles 
that. But what is our self-interest? Dollars and 
cents? Yes, that is an element; because dollars 



54 Americans of To-day and To-morrozv 

and cents represent comforts, intelligence, ideals 
in the homes of the millions; and it is in the 
homes of the American millions that all these 
questions are going to be settled. But are they 
going to be settled exclusively for the comfort 
of those homes ? Certainly not ; for we are more 
than mere animals. They are going to be settled 
for the comfort of those American homes and 
also for the comfort of . all other homes which 
our American influence reaches — and for the 
comfort of all these homes as a condition of their 
realizing the highest things of life. Therefore 
all our policies must be determined by those 
principles to which Richelieu's secret is the key — 
justice. 

But what is justice? We have so many differ- 
ent opinions that it is hard to decide? Take the 
Philippine problem for illustration. Strenuous 
dissenters from the nation's policy affirm that we 
should leave them to themselves — that it is un- 
just to force upon them other ideas than they 
have. Others — and a majority — assert that the 
firm hand and, gradually, as they can compre- 
hend instruction, the ideals of civilization are the 
true method with them, as with a child. In this 



IV hat Shall We Do with Onr Pozverf 55 

the writer shares. But of this one thing we may 
be sure: that whatever is just, whatever is best, 
the American milHons will decide upon regardless 
of cost. In other words, power is worse than 
useless unless directed to the best ends which the 
possessor of that power is capable of conceiving. 
And the moral desire to do the right thing will 
give us the light to see what that right thing is. 
Good manifestations of American spirit are 
found in those powerful Americans who ''do 
things" in business. One such — a real "captain 
of industry" — said in young manhood : "I am 
going to do something in this world; I do not 
care whether it brings me millions or not. I know 
I shall organize vast industrial and commercial 
forces. I have it in me, and when I realize my 
plans I am going to do justice between capital 
and labor. Capital and labor, what misleading 
terms ! Why not oneness ? Why are not our 
interests all the same?" These words of the 
dreaming youth thirty years ago are now the ac- 
complished deeds of the mature man. For that 
young man is now the directing mind of large 
industrial organizations. And beneath what 
others call self is an almost religious desire to 



56 Americans of To-day and To-morrow 

do his duty, not to the American people only, but 
to humankind. He has introduced "publicity" — 
a statement to the American nation, to the world 
— of the assets and prospects of his corporations. 
He has developed and put into practice profit- 
sharing among scores of thousands of laborers. 
He has given the toiler a "stake" in the enter- 
prises the toiler's labor helps create. And in all 
of it as high an ideal of justice as that which in- 
spired King Arthur at his Round Table has gov- 
erned him. More and more it is governing most 
of America's eighty millions. It is true that 
there are among us those who are sordidly self- 
seeking. They will not prevail in private busi- 
ness or in public life. They are not worth 
considering. 

Be sure, young American of the twentieth cen- 
tury, that you may succeed temporarily with self- 
ish plans and unjust practices, but all your large 
and far-reaching and permanent designs will fail 
unless they are based on justice to your fellow- 
man and to the world. 

A weak person may be tolerated for taking 
little advantages, but never a strong one. Put- 
ting it on the lowest plane, a strong man or a 



What Shall We Do zvith Our Power? 57 

strong- nation can afford to be just. It is good 
business. It begets a respect and confidence 
which are the best possible assets. And so it is 
that out of the very fact of our overwhelming 
powers grows the corresponding necessity of 
justice in our dealings with the world. Like 
conservatism, it is an element of our national 
character which our situation compels. The 
American statesman of to-day will fail even in 
the regard of his own countrymen if, in foreign 
controversies, he does not do justice even though 
that should work apparent sacrifices of American 
interests. All admit the power of public opinion 
in our internal affairs. Similarly, there is such 
a thing as international opinion, world opinion. 
He is a daring and foolish man who refuses to 
heed the settled convictions of his fellow-citizens 
in town, county and state ; and just so the nation 
is unwise which despises the esteem which the 
rest of mankind puts upon it. When it is seen 
that, through the years and decades and centuries, 
a nation is just, a moral regard is earned more 
powerful than fleets and armies. 

As before insisted upon, the principles of na- 
tional conduct must be the principles of individual 



58 Americans of To-day and To-morrozv 

conduct of the citizen. Let us repeat, a thousand 
times if necessary, that no true American can 
separate himself from the nation and its destiny. 
Let us weld and fuse our destinies into the na- 
tion's destiny. Thus, the nation's ideals become 
our personal ideals; and if the American nation 
must be just, so must the American citizen. If 
''charity begins at home" no less does justice begin 
at home. Let every young American know that 
sharp practice is a certain method of business and 
social suicide. When a man after years of right 
living and upright dealings has it said of him, 
''He will do what is right," he has achieved a 
power among his fellows which millions could 
not give. 

We have a class of practical people who want 
to get at the physical machinery for doing a thing 
which ought to be done. It is a good thing that 
we have such a class; but sometimes their prac- 
ticability makes them unpractical — in great affairs. 
If you cannot point out just how a desired end is 
to be reached they will say, "What is the use?" 
And so of this general necessity for justice as 
the ruling element in American policies and char- 
acter, they will exclaim : "We agree, but by 



What Shall We Do zvith Our Pozverf 59 

what device will yon determine jnstice and en- 
force it?" Bnt the large things of human life 
and history are not to be determined by any de- 
vices, but by a thing more effective than any 
mechanism of legislation. That thing is the 
spirit of the people. That is what we are plead- 
ing for now. If a people have woven into the 
fiber of their moral and mental being the element 
of justice, they will work out right conclusions 
as each occasion arises. 

This government is based upon public opinion ; 
and public opinion is the composite conviction 
formed in the familiar conversations of the 
American fireside. 

Nobody who knows anything of American life 
ever appeals to the individual. He appeals to 
the family. No man's individual opinion is sure 
to be right upon anything; but it will not be far 
from wrong if his opinion is the conclusion of 
all around his hearthstone. It is amazing with 
what economic sense the mother, wife or sister 
will modify the views of husband, brother and 
son ; and even the boys and girls, when large 
questions of right are put to them, are swift with 
elemental ideas of large and rough justice. And 



6o Americans of To-day and To-morrozu 

so the opinions which issue from the mihions of 
American homes, combined, are in the lone run 
going to be right opinions. 

This is not only sentimentally so; it is prac- 
tically true, and also scientifically correct. ''Na- 
ture cares nothing for the individual," said an 
American scientist of universal and permanent 
reputation. "Nature eliminates the individual; 
Nature cares only for the pair — for the family." 
And so in the science of public affairs, individual 
opinion may be neglected ; but the opinion of the 
family cannot be. 

Let each American family, then, be the nation 
in miniature and decide all questions, foreign and 
domestic, as though it were the court of the last 
resort. There is one thing that everybody who 
has studied Russia must admire about that singu- 
lar people, however much he may dislike other 
things about them — the whole nation is built upon 
the idea of the family. It is a natural method of 
national solidarity. It is our American method, 
too. We are a nation of families ; and, as pointed 
out. these families are so connected that the whole 
nation is a family. So that if the American fam- 
ily adopts justice as its ideal in daily conduct, 



JVhaf Shall We Do with Our Pozvcr? 6i 

the nation is naturally g'oing to adopt justice as 
its ideal in international conduct. And the Ameri- 
can family will — does — make justice its ideal. 
For selfishness, individual advantage, personal 
gain of one member of the family as against the 
common good of all, is a thing abhorrent to the 
very idea of family itself. Given the principle of 
selfishness in sufficient force and the idea of fam- 
ily explodes. Given the idea of justice and for- 
bearance, and the family is vital and enduring. 

We are at present used to the word ''commer- 
cialism." I like it very well if it means prosperity 
and happiness for the American home. But 
nobody likes it if it stands for mere animal opu- 
lence. But should any reader of these pages 
have reduced his habits of thought to dollars and 
cents, let us spend a paragraph in showing that 
justice pays higher dividends than anything else. 

Take mercantile life. In early practice, when 
he was studying possible clients, a young lawyer 
lieard a leading business man referred to as the 
''sharpest buyer in his line." Investigation 
showed that he was a man who took advantage 
wherever he could. For a while it really ap- 
peared that success was the slave of his cunning 



62 Americans of To-day and To-niorrozv 

brain. But it was only for a while. Not two 
decades have passed and that man is not only a 
business failure but has rendered further busi- 
ness success an impossibility. He has lost credit 
and countenance among those with whom he 
dealt. "Advantage" and not "justice" was his 
motto, and that motto led him to the brink over 
which he plunged. 

A young lawyer, brilliantly endowed and who 
started out with fine performance which argued 
a still finer promise, was seen by the judges on 
the bench and by his professional brethren to in- 
dulge in "sharp practice." He became fond of 
finesse in professional work. The ethics of the 
law were to him "foolei-y." He said one day in 
the intoxication of success over one of his mas- 
terpieces of craft: "Well, I admit it; I like 
sharp practice, and it wins, too. Besides, it is 
such fun to disarm a fool." What was the re- 
sult? With all his finished swordsmanship he 
soon found himself dueling with all society; and 
that master antagonist disarmed him. With 
his superb abilities he has been quietly elimi- 
nated from his profession and from all human 
usefulness. 



What Sliall We Do zcith Our Pozverf 63 

Take politics. It is noteworthy that the great 
"bosses" are scrupulous of their word and prize 
the reputation of "never going back on a friend" 
dearer than real statesmen prize the authorship 
of great laws or the championship of high ideals. 
This is an acknowledgment that even from their 
view point these bosses make personal justice the 
mainspring of their machines. They would fail 
otherwise. And how many times has the country 
noted the collapse of individual careers because 
of inherent selfishness and injustice. Sometimes 
a man by wealth or other means reaches a posi- 
tion of power. If his ambition gets the better of 
his common sense, his fears of possible rivals dis- 
tort his whole moral perspective. He becomes 
unjust to other public men. He schemes for the 
downfall of those he thinks dangerous to his self- 
ish hopes. If he controls a newspaper he is sure 
to see that his organ overcapitalizes his public 
work to the people and also that it discredits and 
conceals the work of other public men. What 
is the result? In the American home (that tem- 
ple of American conscience) a great question 
mark vaguely forms in the family mind and con- 
stantly grows more definite until it is a burning 



64 Americans of To-day and To-morrot 



IV 



sign. And before that blazing interrogation 
point the schemes and ambitions of this pubHc 
worker of injustice dissolve and come to naught. 
Why do they come to naught? Merely because 
the ambitious one has forgotten justice; and he 
who forgets justice, justice will forsake. And 
justice is the ruling deity of the American house- 
hold and the American nation. 

Into our daily conduct, then, let us each weave 
this all-powerful element. Its growth, upon cul- 
tivation, will surprise the most skeptical. Mr. 
Porter, in his work on ''Moral and Mental Phi- 
losophy," which years ago was a text-book in 
all colleges, speaking of the force of habit, said 
something to the effect that ''Neglect conscience 
in your daily deeds and it will soon be atrophied. 
Cultivate it and it will soon become as delicate 
as a woman's blush." And Hamlet tells his 
mother that "habit is a second nature." Mod- 
ern scientific thought will not go that far; yet 
all will admit as a matter of daily experience that 
the influence of habit has a power something 
akin to the power of Nature itself. The power 
of habit in moral ideas is just as great as in im- 
moral practices. So, if the habit of our daily 



What SJmll We Do with Our Poiver? 65 

lives is justice, it will grow after a while into a 
fixture of our character. Conversely, if all re- 
solve that the deeds of the nation in our transac- 
tions with foreign people shall have, ahove all, 
the ingredient of justice in them we shall soon 
come to apply to ourselves the same thought 
which makes us require the nation to be just. 

Justice, then, Americans of the twentieth cen- 
tury! Pride in the republic is false if not based 
on justice. Hopes for the republic's destiny are 
mere mirages unless justice makes them real. 
Neglect not ideals. They are more permanent 
than cities or farms or railroads. And of all 
ideals, justice is the first; over all ideals jus- 
tice presides. 



5-Ani. T. r. 



AMERICAN THOROUGHNESS 



CHAPTER IV 
American Thoroughness 



EVERY American should be concerned with 
the large characteristics of national be- 
ing. The little prudences and wisdoms 
of individual life and character, the individual 
will work out from his own experience and the 
councils of the wise. But all these will finally 
converge upon the few great standards of com- 
munal character. These must be elemental — can 
only be elemental; for the community is very 
much akin to nature — is indeed a manifestation 
of nature like oceans or stars or plants or ani- 
mals. In the ceaseless flow of the Gulf Stream 
the unaccountable drops of water may each bear 
some different ingredient of matter, yet all are 
impelled in the same direction. So in our na- 
tional life the individual with all of his pecul- 
iarities must conform to the general tendency of 
the mass to which he belongs. And what we 
are now engaged in is finding our natural course 
— making a survey of those fundamental ele- 

69 



^o Americans of To-day and To-morrow 

ments of national character which grow out of 
the American people themselves — of their quan- 
tity and quality of power, their position for the 
using of that power. 

We are not moralizing; we are analyzing. 

There is no teacher of the fundamentals like 
Nature. And we are discovering here a kinship 
between Nature and peoples and nations. Think 
deep enough and you will find in nature and the 
nation not alone a similarity, but more; you will 
find a oneness, a unity. They have the same 
rhythmic on-going; the same convulsions, cata- 
clysms and hurricanes; the same periods of 
peace, generation and fruitage — the same every- 
thing. Therefore the cosmic lessons of Nature 
should be the decalogue of national living and 
doing. 

The first thing we observe in the material uni- 
verse is thoroughness. Nature has the severe 
morality of the artist. She is not content to 
leave the picture unfinished. Like the true artist, 
she must work it out to the smallest detail, as in 
the case of the inspiring tale of the painter who 
starved and froze but finally finished his work 
to the last application of pigment no larger than 



American Thoroughness 71 

a needle's point. If Nature wants a desert she 
produces Sahara. If she wants mountains she is 
not content until thousands of miles of them are 
heaped one upon the other in a very plethora of 
rugged perfection; and we have the Cordilleras 
or the Alps or the Himalayas. 

There is in her thoroughness a regularity, too : 
she will repeat seasons of the same kind — 
spring, summer, autumn and winter — through 
countless ages in untiring' iteration. And each 
season in itself is perfect. She will have no 
icicles in June ; it is the time for roses and yel- 
lowing wheat. And she gets through her work 
while she is at it. No doubt that is why the 
great characters of history have been so often 
likened to Nature — they did their work down 
to the final stroke with a splendid disregard of * 
everything but the completion of their task. And 
so we find the deeds of Cc^esar or Napoleon or 
the words of Milton or Goethe compared to the 
movement of stars or the perfection of fury the 
tempest displays. 

Put tongues to the trees, rivers and plains of 
our continental republic and the word of power 
which all would utter in unison to the American 



"^2 Americans of To-day and To-morrozv 

people would be "Thoroughness." The fertile 
alluvium of the Mississippi Valley cries out to 
the millions to whom its productivity yields life : 
"Be not in haste; the master hand that made me 
for you was infinitely leisurely and took aeons 
for my preparation. For that master hand, like 
the hand of all mastery, was thorough." We 
dare not go brawling through our time doing 
immeasurable things by piecemeal. Who cares 
for the reputation of a Coleridge? "What vast 
possibilities his fragments of work display!" 
cries the critic. But what have we to do with 
his "possibilities"? What matter "fragments" 
to us? We care not for power, however bulky, 
nor for ideals, however exalted, unless they realize 
some finished performance. The heyday of 
► Athens was less than a century; yet in that time 
of the ripeness and fruition of her effort she pro- 
duced perfect work which does us good now and 
will do the race good as long as the race itself 
endures. 

The defect of the present period of our Ameri- 
can life is want of this very thoroughness. Per- 
haps it is natural that it should be so. America 
is the young man of the nations. And young 



I 



Aincrican Thoroughness 73 

manhood is not careful of completeness, finish 
and perfection of task. The young heart beats 
with the force of the reproductive time of life, 
and arterial blood flushes the brain with currents 
of action and enterprise impatient of the careful 
processes which thorough thinking and thorough 
doing require. And here comes an apparent 
paradox and conflict of the natural and the nec- 
essary. Our age and situation and all the ingre- 
dients of our being make us strong and therefore 
negligent of details. But by the same token, if 
permanent and beneficent results are to be 
wrought by our effort, the firm hand of Thor- 
oughness must hold in check our impetuosities. 
The older peoples have learned this ; and by 
doing thoroughly well their work with their com- 
paratively inferior tools they are able to compete 
very respectably with us in commerce and in- 
dustry and to surpass us in letters, art and phi- 
losophy. Yet with our youth and the imagination, 
ideality and daring thereof, with our coal in its 
beds, our iron in its mountains, and our fields 
ready with the fatness which they have stored 
up through their idle millenniums; with all the 
things with which the high gods of circumstance 



74 Americans of To-day and To-morrow 

have endowed us, the efforts of other nations 
would afford no comparison, but only contrast, if 
we were to use our opportunity with thoroughness. 
The enemy of thoroughness is Haste. And 
the parent of Haste is Immoderate Desire. And 
this in turn is a quality and defect of youth. Con- 
sider this in our civic life. We decide to build 
a monument. We establish commissions for it, 
appropriate money not generously but lavishly. 
Next year we say, "What! is the work not yet 
done ?" When, as a matter of art, the construct- 
ive brain has not yet had time to conceive the 
design which we would have perfect and ever- 
lasting. Or, we are confronted with the economic 
development of industrial organization awkwardly 
called "trusts." They are good as a whole; but 
they display along with good certain evil. At 
the evil we cry out, and should. We ask for 
laws, and are furious if they are not produced 
instantly; as though the lawgiver can turn out 
statutes as the lumber mill turns out shingles. 
When finally the law, under the pressure of 
public impatience and therefore full of imperfec- 
tions, is produced, we expect results from it by 
the very process of printing it. It is a character- 



American Thoroughness 75 

istic of our national life at the present time. 
Thoughtful men and, better still, the thoughtful 
masses — for we have ''the thoughtful masses" — 
see that the day has already dawned when this 
neurotic haste, with its crudity and partial per- 
formance, must give place to the very opposite 
qualities. 

England has been successful as an administra- 
tive government because she has doggedly clung 
to the British ideal of thoroughness. The satir- 
ists and poets are seldom wrong; and he who 
pictured British character as a bulldog was ac- 
curate. But her bulldog tenacity is the tenacity 
of a purpose not to be loosened till its work is 
utterly done. So the British people in their time, 
which now appears growing to a close, have 
wrought well and carefully; and this notwith- 
standing the fact that the British mind for the 
last hundred years has shown a singular atrophy 
of the inventive faculty, a sort of sterility of 
resourcefulness. 

We Americans, on the contrary, are luxuriant 
in expedients. We produce devices to meet a 
given situation with a readiness akin to that with 
which tropical soil shoots forth vegetation. We, 



"jd Americans of To-day and To-morrozv 

too, have, in the sweep of that divine purpose 
which directs the destinies of peoples, become an 
administering power. With our wonderful adapt- 
abihty, our fertihty of thought and our moral 
elevation we shall undoubtedly produce an ad- 
ministrative system for our new possessions as 
much in advance of anything the world has seen 
as the telegraph of our Morse or the electric light 
of our Edison is beyond the slow processes of 
communication and dull methods of lighting of 
other peoples and older times. That is to say, 
we shall do this unless our impatience spoils the 
thoroughness of our execution. That is the crux 
of all our difficulties. It is the explosive point 
of the Prince Rupert's drop of our destiny. 

The Philippines would give us comparatively 
little trouble — on the other hand would yield an 
increasing harvest of material reward and of na- 
tional satisfaction at righteous deeds done — if we 
would not deny Time a partnership in our effort. 
If we would be content to make our work thor- 
ough (realizing that thoroughness involves the 
regeneration, moral, mental and physical, of a 
people, the introduction of new methods, the 
planting of new ideals, and therefore requires 



I 



American Thoroughness yy 

patience) the prol:)lem would become plain and 
the labor easy. The companion of the Thorough 
is the Gradual. How unreasonable to expect in- 
stantaneous results in world-work! We clamor 
for returns at the national counting-house and for 
the metamorphosis of Malay barbarism into New 
England civilization in a shorter time than it took 
our pioneers to clear a field and raise a profitable 
crop. 

Also, we are competitors of England and Ger- 
many in the world's markets. If w^e are wise 
enough to add England's former and Germany's 
present Thoroughness in industry and method, the 
world of commerce and trade is literally ours. 
If we make Thoroughness the superintendent of 
our industry the republic will be the commercial 
hegemon of all countries and all peoples. 

Go to see the performance of excellent acrobats 
wdienever you can. There is in their work far 
more than diversion ; there is instruction which 
amounts to a stimulus. Observe the perfect cal- 
culation of distance, the sure, quick grasp of 
hand, the exact computation of time, and, through 
all the hazard of it, the grace and case of the 
flying bird. And consider, you who observe, that 



y^ Americans of To-day and To-morrow 

their art is a trivial one — the lowest form of 
amusement. Yet reflect on the infinite pains they 
take for the sake of perfection. They could 
not perform the simplest of their complicated 
feats did they not practice daily — did they not 
bend the whole energies of their life to thorough- 
ness. Yet you who are a lawyer, or you who 
are a writer, or you who are a man of affairs, 
or still you other who are a statesman, or should 
be — all your occupations are large and worth 
while compared with the profession of the poor 
acrobat. But does any of us reach the acrobat's 
perfection? If we do not, he is a better man 
than we. He plays, his part — plays it thoroughly. 
We dissipate our energies. We do as much as 
we must and no more. Said a writer of great 
present popularity on this very theme: "How 
long do I labor over my pages? Not long, for 
the publisher is eager for them. And they wall 
sell as well to-day or better than if I put un- 
limited care to their revision." But he was 
wrong there. Gibbon rewrote the first few chap- 
ters of his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Em- 
pire" fifteen or sixteen times; and the ancients 
spent a lifetime on what would now fill a single 



America] I Thoroughness 79 

volume. I will tell you, my friend, our national 
need is Thoroughness. It is my need of needs 
and yours too, doubt not. The acrobats bring 
it home to us with humiliating emphasis. So 
do sharpshooters and all other performers of the 
arts of inferior diversion. Observe the vaude- 
ville marksman shoot through a finger ring held 
by an assistant, and reflect that it took years of 
practice and scores of thousands of shots to ac- 
quire the skill which has no use but to amuse us. 

In Canton, China, you may see a workman 
with a bent steel tool and a lathe turning a block 
of ivory into a ball. Without breaking this ball 
he hollows out a space until within the first cover 
is another ball; and this he hollows out and con- 
tinues the process until perhaps twenty balls are 
each within the unbroken sphere of the other. 
These spheres he perforates with little stars and 
flowers. He has, at the end of indescribable toil, 
produced nothing better than a beautiful curi- 
osity, you will say. Yet, he has produced per- 
fection; and no perfection can be called trivial. 
You go away from the patient workman with 
your arrogance humbled. 

How is it that Thoroughness is the necessity 



8o Americans of To-day and To-morrow 

of our present national condition any more than 
it was yesterday or the day before? Let ns an- 
swer this by taking commerce as an ilkistration. 
Until yesterday we were a developing people. 
We were engaged in the movement of com- 
mnnities within ourselves — planting new states, 
constructing railroads, building cities, locating 
and opening mines. We were "finding ourselves." 
And though that process is not yet completed, it 
is so far completed that we are matured and are 
in direct competition with other mature people. 
Well, we cannot sell our articles unless they are 
better made and cheaper than the articles pro- 
duced by other peoples. All this means not in- 
genuity only, which is to-day our best commer- 
cial traveler, but also thoroughness in the making 
and finishing of our merchandise. 

Or answer it by art and letters. Heretofore, 
a writer has seen a demand for a book. *'The 
demand may cease," says the frugal man of the 
pen. '1 will hasten my sheets to the printer." 
But this commercialism of letters is passing. 
Writers are finding out that their Aladdin repu- 
tations wdiich yield profit and the vainglory of 
notoriety wither overnight. And the money 



America]} TJiorouoJiuess 8i 



;^' 



greed which made them hasten to write the book 
of the hour is ah'eady succum1:)ing t<^ their in- 
stinct of immortahty which commands them to 
write the book of the decade — the century. They 
are beginning to seize upon the lasting things 
of nature and Hfe. The modern scientific method 
is helping this; and that spirit which is so stern 
a tyrant in the laboratory is spreading among 
the American masses. The American fireside is 
growing to be a tribunal of criticism. Note how 
impatiently a political sophistry is dismissed ; 
how quickly the family circle rejects an untruth; 
with what contempt a slattern piece of work is 
cast aside. The magazine publisher recognizes 
this. He pays fabulous prices for the most care- 
ful productions. Ask him why, and he will an- 
swer ; ''Because the American public demands 
the best. Articles equally interesting but not 
equally veracious or equally thorough can be had 
at a small fraction of the cost of our best mate- 
rial ; but, you see, the circulation immediately 
drops. The instinct of the reading public is un- 
erring and knows without analysis the perfect 
work from the imperfect, and demands it — will 
have it." 

6-Am. T. T. 



82 Americans of To-day and To-morrow 

The time is ripe for the American Leckys, 
Mommsens, Spencers. The present century will 
produce the American Goethe and Balzac; we 
dare not say the American Shakespeare, for, 
like the Bible, Shakespeare seems to be the inter- 
pretation of the present and future as well as of 
the past. 

''You Americans may give subsidies to your 
ships, but we shall still hold our supremacy in 
the passenger service of the seas," said the presi- 
dent of one of the great German steamship lines. 
''We shall do this in spite of your subsidies, in 
spite of your undeniable gifts in construction and 
all enterprise, merely because you have not the 
gift of thoroughness; and we Germans have. 
We shall save enough in our selection of provi- 
sions; we shall win enough in alluring passen- 
gers by the cjuality of our wine and food to offset 
the artificial help of your government. For ex- 
ample, although I am president of this company, 
I personally select our wines; I personally ex- 
amine the quality of our provisions. Imagine 
the president of one of your companies doing 
the like," 

I say not that this German commercial king 



America Ji Thoroughness 83 

of the ocean spoke truly. I merely cite his state- 
ments. One thing is beyond all question, how- 
ever — German maritime supremacy is built on 
the keel of German thoroughness. Please 
reflect that the German flag has become one 
of the dominant ensigns of the oceans only 
within the last twenty years — no time at all. 
But then, you see, the German ship lines in 
partnership with the German Imperial Gov- 
ernment maintain a corps of students of the 
craft of shipbuilding. They have become 
the nicest calculators of the condensation of 
power, the enlargement of space in the con- 
struction of vessels, the adaptation of size and 
strength to capacity and speed the world has 
ever seen. 

Yet Germany has only a window on the sea, 
while to the American republic the oceans are 
our encircling verandas. As pointed out in an 
earlier chapter, it is impossible that America shall 
not become the first sea power of the world and 
remain so. That is the verdict of our coast lines, 
our harbors, the currents of the deep, the trade 
winds and the globe's continents and islands. 
There is no appeal from the verdict of that jury 



84 Americans of To-day and To-morrozv 

of geography. Yet, it will be no undisputed 
mastery unless Thoroughness is made the ad- 
miral of our fleets. 

Republican government is so superior to any 
other form of management of organized society 
that it detracts not from the excellence of our 
institutions to mention some of the drawbacks. 
Perhaps the most distinguished benefit which 
our popular government confers on the citizen is 
unlimited opportunity. Yet unlimited opportu- 
nity means unlimited rivalry ; and this means a 
haste of achievement which becomes forgetful 
of substantial results. So we have the craze of 
getting rich quick; and some fear that this may 
become a permanent insanity. One man makes 
a great deal of money; immediately everybody 
else wants to make as much or more. From 
this ambition of getting large wealth comes 
the desire to get it as quickly as possible. 
And this means the neglect of the solid and 
substantial, the ignoring of that which will 
be really beneficial next year as well as this 
year. 

To all this a halt must be called. The national 
disease of million-mania must be checked and 



American Thoroughness 85 

finally eradicated. But like all social and indus- 
trial evils the disease is curing itself. So many 
men have piled up so many millions that large 
wealth is becoming common — almost vulgar. 
Therefore the minds of those who got rich yes- 
terday are already turning away from the dreary 
emptiness which sheer wealth affords, to that full- 
ness of life and real richness of reward which 
come of doing something lasting and valuable 
for human society. 

Also, the complicated nature of modern busi- 
ness demands the highest order of constructive 
talent in the management of our enormous mod- 
ern investments. We are developing, instead of 
the old-time ''financier," real statesmen of busi- 
ness. The newly rich from fortunate adventure, 
mere chance or lucky speculation wait like mes- 
senger boys the command of the real generals of 
industry and commerce. 

The general superintendent of one of the mid- 
dle western railway systems, who started in as a 
freight handler at a dollar a day and now gov- 
erns ten thousand men, said : "We must have an 
assistant superintendent. We have been looking 
for one for a year. The road has in its employ 



86 Americans of To-day and To-morrow 

half a dozen sons of multi-millionaires whose 
fathers would do anything to get them the place. 
I cannot consent that any of them shall have it. 
Highly educated as they are, wealthy and influ- 
ential as they are, not a man of them is thorough 
and persistent. We cannot intrust the machinery 
of our immense organization of traffic to incom- 
petent hands. The dividends of our stockholders 
are at stake; and the lives of our hundreds of 
thousands of passengers are a factor in the selec- 
tion of my assistant. We are searching the 
country for the man who has the ability, the 
health, the habits, and above all the thor- 
oughness which this situation absolutely 
demands." 

This is an instance which any person widely 
acquainted can duplicate by the hundred. And 
so, in spite of the haste which the opportunity 
and rivalry fostered by our democratic institu- 
tions create, the very structure of our social and 
industrial organization requires not even integ- 
rity more than it requires thoroughness. Your 
great newspaper, your great railroad, your great 
industrial corporation would fall to pieces with- 
out it, as masses of matter would dissolve into 



American Thoroughness Sy 

dust were it not for the mysterious force that we 
call cohesion. Thus we see that out of our na- 
tional situation, out of the very elements of our 
present state of development, out of our indi- 
vidual needs as members of our continental com- 
munity, Thoroughness is called for not as a 
matter of prudence or advisability, but as a mat- 
ter of absolute necessity. 

On Thoroughness hereafter our statesmanship 
must rest — no ill-considered laws, no rash policies 
for the American people. 

On Thoroughness our diplomacy must rest — 
no brilliant play for present position, but each 
piece of American diplomacy comprehending the 
centuries. 

On Thoroughness our industrial development 
must rest — no schemes which may dazzle for a 
decade and then break up because they are not 
carefully connected with the growth of the 
age. 

On Thoroughness American literature must 
rest — no flashing comet of literary genius mak- 
ing the world gasp for the moment, but, instead, 
fixed stars that shine forever like the classics of 
the past. 



88 Americans of To-day and To-jnorrozu 

Thoroughness, Thoroughness, and yet again 
Thoroughness, from the tying of your shoe- 
string to the solving of the nation's highest prob- 
lems ! It is the talismanic American word of the 
twentieth century. 



OUR PLACE AND PURPOSE 



CHAPTER V 
Our Place and Purpose 



YOUR Scotchman has the genius of pointed 
and practical wisdom. It was Sir WilUam 
Hamilton, I think, who declared that com- 
parative history is the best of all instruction and 
an exercise for accurate thought superior to 
geometry or logarithms. Take a dozen nations, 
discover their differences, and we have multi- 
tudes of experiments in statecraft as useful to 
the philosopher of public affairs as the recorded 
tests of the laboratory are to the man of physical 
science. Find a common result of national ac- 
tion along any line, find universal occurrences 
repeating themselves continuously, and you arrive 
at something which scientific thought calls reliable 
truth. 

It is a singular thing — or, rather, the expected 
and natural thing — that powerful nations have 
been religious nations; and that the higher their 
religion the greater their strength and the better 
uses to which it has been put. "AH the great 
91 



92 Americans of To-day and To-nwrrozv 

ages have been the ages of belief," says our 
American interpreter of the universe. It is per- 
fectly foolish to put this statement in the con- 
verse and to say that the higher a nation's 
development the better the form of religion its 
people develop. The fact remains, and we can 
put one before the other without destroying the 
essential verity. It is futile for our present pur- 
poses to file an historical bill of particulars in 
support of the above generalization. An entire 
volume of brilliancy and attractiveness might be 
written on the historical aspects of religions and 
nations. But it is agreed by those who are va- 
riedly read that the best national manifestations 
of the human mind have been those of people 
profoundly reverent. ''The whole state of man," 
says Emerson, "is a state of culture; and its 
flowering and completion may 1)e described as 
religion or morals." 

Human thought in the mass, it appears, as- 
pires to the noblest things under the mighty, and 
to this day unexplained, influence of ideals; and 
religion seems to make the very loftiest of all 
ideals concrete and vital. It establishes a living 
relationship, as it were, between the thoughts of 



Our Place and Purpose 93 

man and the Unknowable Thonght which we feel 
all around us, and which we condense into the 
Sacred Name. Thus a people's purposes are 
given an elevation, fervor and purity best, and 
yet poorly, described by that vague, mysterious 
and awful word "divine." 

Here is no argument that the American peo- 
ple ought to be a religious people as a matter of 
thrift or prudence, or national longevity or the 
sordidness of any material reward. We cannot 
consent to tune our lute to the ring of gold. We 
cannot consent that the chord we shall strike and 
the note we shall contribute to the music of hu- 
man history shall be merely the minor chord of 
a thick and sodden prosperity. If the American 
people, as a nation, must be a religious people, 
the profit of that eternal circumstance must be a 
very minor incident. 

We are agreed that, as a people, we are so 
superbly circumstanced in the economy and 
make-up of the world's map and human affairs 
that we dominate the whole contemporary hu- 
man situation. In mere puissance of muscle, 
might of mind — out of the elements of us — 
springs a natural suzerainty over ajl human 



94 Americans of To-day and To-morrozv 

thought and all human activities. Think care- 
fully for a solid hour and you will concede that 
we ourselves did not create this world-lordship 
any more than we made the continent which 
forms our throne with the oceans as its footstool. 
Perhaps the greatest of all historical thinkers has 
declared that if a section be chopped out of any 
age of history and examined by itself it will be 
found full of contradictions, aimless advances 
and retreats, affirmations and reverses with no 
more meaning than the incoherencies of the con- 
versations of the insane and resembling the 
stampeded and directionless rushings of myriads 
of ants whose little hill your foot pushes over; 
but that if you put this piece of history back 
again and survey it in connection with all that 
went before and comes after, you can no more 
deny an intelligent procedure through the ages 
than you can deny the evidence of the architect's 
plan as the heaps of indiscriminate material grad- 
ually take shape in the rising structure which, 
before a brick was made, was carefully drafted 
out on his blue-prints. 

Also, we are agreed that our mdividual exist- 
ence (which every mature man realizes is so brief 



Ottr Place and Purpose 95 

as scarcely to be worth while) and our national 
on-going (which we fondly hope will project 
hundreds of years beyond the horizon of our 
present sight) are both of them very like the 
eating and sleeping of mere animals if ideals be 
not at once the inspiration and end of all our 
efforts. A preceding chapter was devoted to the 
ideal of justice as the keystone of national right- 
eousness. Try this experiment on any company 
of Americans you choose : Propose the subject 
of our national superiority and ask what we are 
going to do about it. The majority will always 
tell you that we are going to do right about it; 
we are going to work out good with it. Then 
ask, "why right?" and "why good?" and ''why 
just?" and any other "why" which imperfectly 
inquires into the best American aspirations. The 
answer of the majority of that company will al- 
ways strike a religious note — which, after all, is 
the dominant note in American character. 

Let one sequester one's self and thus, and thus 
alone one can, put to himself the whole enigma 
of our position, power and purpose. In that 
mental solitude (away from the distorted pro- 
portions which one's personal interests give to 



g6 Americans of To-day and To-niorrozu 

things immediately around him and where all 
things are seen in their just relations) all of our 
indescribably rich and marvelous national gifts 
and equipment seem foolishness, after all, if they 
are not for very much better ends than even we 
can conceive of and do not look to consequences 
as eternal as they are exalted. And yet all of 
these rich conceptions of the uses to which our 
endowment as a people must be put, if we would 
not be shamed in the eyes of mankind and his- 
tory, are themselves foolishness unless in doing 
this work we act as the apprentices and servants 
of some master craftsman whose large design is 
not laid before us and would not be understood 
if it were laid before us. 

Perhaps neither this analysis nor any analysis 
occurs to our scores of American millions — but 
no matter. The result does occur to them — flows 
in their blood, throbs in their brain, and is a part 
of the indrawing of each renewing breath. Thus 
all of our effort which otherwise would be merely 
stupid and purposeless becomes vivid and glo- 
rious with a certainty that we are executing the 
plans of the Infinite. The instinct of the divine 
within us becomes more than instinct — becomes 



Our Place and Purpose 97 

an intelligent if vague conception. And so we 
find that we Americans are a profoundly re- 
ligious people. We cannot help it. It springs, 
like all other fundamental characteristics, out of 
the elements of our being and our place and 
antecedents in the history of man. 

It is no easy thing to write of religion in na- 
tional character. The subject is very high and 
yet all-permeating, and, at the same time, as 
delicate and sensitive as the ten thousand nerve 
filaments that shoot through our being. But 
when we are analyzing the large and controlling 
elements of American character (or, put it in 
the synthetic form and say, when we are draw- 
ing the outlines of that mighty form which looms 
so vastly against the modern skies, to, wit, the 
American) — when we are doing this, how are 
we to escape dealing with religion? For does 
not the church edifice dominate our cities? Do 
not cathedral spires give character to all our 
assemblages of commercial architecture? Does 
not Trinity stand at the head of Wall Street? 
Or go into the country, and do you not find the 
places of worship (and hard by them the school- 
houses) giving meaning and aspiration to the 

7~Am. T. T. 



98 Americans of To-day and To-morrozv 

whole rural landscape? At the critical hours of 
American history, when the noonday sky was 
midnight and the atmosphere saturated with 
murk — where do we find our great American 
leaders unable by human eyes to see before them ? 
We find them on their knees, beseeching- divine 
guidance and groping for a clasp of the Unseen 
Hand to lead them and this people into the light 
again. The whole winter of the American troops 
at Valley Forge is an historical panorama of 
heroism, self-denial and sacrifice. Yet every 
noble incident of that season of doom and dread 
furnishes but details of the background for the 
great central picture which the American mind 
loves to dwell upon — Washington on his knees 
at Valley Forge. It was Lincoln who, in 1864, 
declared, *'God bless the churches, and blessed 
be God who in this hour giveth us the churches." 
And Washington, in 1789, immediately after he 
was made the first President of the republic, 
wrote to the bishops of the Methodist . Church : 

I trust the people of every denomination will have oc- 
casion to be convinced that I shall always strive to prove 
a faithful and impartial patron of genuine, vital religion. 
... I take in the kindest part the promise you make of 



Our Place and Purpose 99 

presenting your prayers at the throne of grace for me, 
and that I likewise implore the Divine benediction on 
yourselves and your religious community, 

Let us take no more time with illustrations to 
prove the existence of the deeply religious in 
American character. Detailed proof is superflu- 
ous that a tree exists when the tree itself stands 
before you and it is daylight; or that the ocean 
exists when you are floating on its billowy breast ; 
or that the sun exists when you see it rise and set. 

Though no one is so basely practical as to 
desire the American people to be a religious peo- 
ple for the strength it gives us in the world's 
market-place or on the world's battlefield or over 
the world's high seas; though the meanest mind 
is still noble enough to concede that the Ameri- 
can people should be a religious people, if at all, 
because of the truth of it; yet its practical re- 
sults are notable and noteworthy. There is a 
satisfying stability, a conservative sureness, as well 
as a fervor of energy and loftiness of purpose, 
about a religious nation or a religious man. But 
take away this element of national character and 
you find a sort of aimlessness of national pur- 



loo Americans of To-day and To~morrozv 

pose, a mingled volatility and depression, a sort 
of gayety of despair. 

''You do not appear to me to do things for 
permanent ends," said a young German to a 
citizen of a certain other nation notorious for its 
absence of religion. ''Quite true," responded the 
other, "but think of how much pleasure we get 
out of life." But pleasure is not the purpose of 
human existence. Who dare say that we human 
beings — we men and women — are mere pigs in 
clover? Yet if the animal pleasures of life be 
the end of life, explain, philosopher of the mate- 
rial, the difference between the clubman amonQf 
his cocktails and pigs in their clover? You are 
not going to get very noble national results out 
of a people whose gospel is, "We eat to live and 
live to eat." No wonder such a people would 
be as variable as the track of a fish in the sea or 
a serpent on a rock. 

"I am myself an agnostic, T am very sorry to 
say," said a keen observer of public men, who 
particularly admired a certain American states- 
man, "but I wish with all my heart that 

[the man he admired] believed in somctliiug. 
Some years ago he threw away his faith in God, 



Our Place and Purpose loi 

and soon after followed his faith in man. Since 
then his public conduct has been astute, but with 
no aim but selfishness, and therefore without any 
aim at all. He started as a statesman and has 
developed into a demagogue. His career at first 
was as sure as a well-laid plan of a railway; his 
career since has been zigzag and meaningless." 
That public man died many years ago. His 
memory is already obliterated, although his im- 
mense abilities might have impressed themselves 
upon the whole nation for as long as a decade, 
or possibly two, had he had any fixedness in his 
public purposes or center of gravity in his public 
conduct. As it was, all came to nothing except 
bewitching eloquence on the stump (forgotten 
the next day) and consummate personal craft in 
transient politics ( the memory of which died with 
its momentary effect). 

Let us not get away from Nature. Thorough- 
ness is natural and justice is natural, and so is 
religion natural. The study of ethnology is the 
most fascinating as it is the most informing of 
all studies. Professor Brinton's ''Lectures on 
Ethnography" is a simple book which it is good 



102 Americans of To-day and To-morrow 

to read. But no matter what volume on the 
races of man you open, the scientist of human 
development will tell you that he finds religion 
to be as natural to the human mind as hunger 
is to the human body, and belief in a higher 
power quite as essential to the mental vitality of 
the masses as food is to physical vigor. Most 
of us have passed through the callow stages of 
questioning doubt and aggressive disbelief; and 
then most of us have returned, seeking after the 
sure hold on the eternal, which in the gayety and 
inconsequence of our younger days we shook off 
so lightly. 

Those who are in these foolish stages will ex- 
claim at such statements as are here set out : 
''What! the American people a nation of psalm 
singers! Let us have no canting hypocrisy in 
our national make-up." Nor would I have it so; 
but I would have the American people sure and 
sincere and believing and natural. I would have 
them instinct with fundamental rectitude. I 
would have them morally deep-rooted as the 
mountains and certain as ocean currents, and 
dependable as the sunrise, and punctual in the 
appointments which destiny has made for them 



Our Place and Purpose 103 

as the returning seasons. And all this moral 
sureness, certainty and elevation come only when 
a nation's morality is a religious morality. For 
if morals do not grow out of religion, they are 
nothing but conveniences, like clothing or win- 
dows or fireplaces or knives and forks — nothing 
but rules of prudence, like keeping one's feet dry 
or staying off the railroad track when the whistle 
of the approaching engine blows. But put the 
religious sentiment into this same code of morals 
and they become a part of your being, as the 
blood to the body. With practical morals a man 
will do a certain thing or refrain from doing a 
certain other thing because the effect is advan- 
tageous or the reverse; with religious morals a 
man will do the same thing or refuse to do an- 
other thing because he must — because it is right. 
He has taken definite hold of the hand of some 
Power higher than the god of gain and loss. 
Henceforth his life and career become worth 
while. 

Also, henceforth such a man or nation becomes 
substantial and influential. It is astonishing (or 
is it?) how all of us in our merchandising, law- 
making and policy-building are governed and 



I04 Americans of To-day and To-morrozv 

dominated by the great religions thinkers. The 
pohtician's skill in corralling votes in precinct and 
ward is the servant of the great religions ideals, 
whether he knows it or not. Be he never so 
indnstrions or skillfnl, command he never so 
much money or other means by which suffrage 
is controlled among a free people, he could not 
to-day get ten votes out of a thousand for a 
candidate standing on a platform made of planks 
from Machiavelli's rules of statecraft. His most 
strenuous efforts would be nerveless, and come 
to naught in the service of any man, no matter 
how able, who is believed by the voters to repu- 
diate in practice the fundamental truths taught 
in the churches. 

The country was amused, a few years ago, at 
the platform announced by a New York politician 
who is said to be a very coarse and brutal and 
vulgar man. That platform consists of a single 
sentence : ''Lift up the downtrodden." But that 
statement almost condenses the published pur- 
poses of all churches and all religions and all 
statesmen, and even the Master Himself. And 
thus the cunning of the low and base serves the 
higher powers in spite of itself. 



Our Place and Purpose 105 

Nature is a great restorer. It has been demon- 
strated that a river of sufficient volume can take 
the sewage of a city like Berlin and so purify 
it that, forty miles below^, the water is lit for 
human drink. And what medicine is there like 
the iodine-laden atmosphere of the ocean or the 
climate of the mountains charged with the ozone 
which that ancient chemist, Nature, works up 
in those magnificent laboratories? There must 
be something in the mental and moral structure 
of a people which performs the same service. 
There are ptomaines of the intellect as well as 
of the flesh ; and is it not a commonplace of 
daily speech to mention moral corruption ? Well ! 
there must be a curative movement, a purifying 
process and element to correct this. I find it in 
the religious tendencies of peoples. And here 
again is noted a similarity between Nature and 
religion in their like medicinal effects. Nature 
keeps the material universe pure and wholesome, 
and religion keeps the intellectual and moral 
universe sweet and generous. 

''Seek strength on your knees," wrote a wise 
woman to a friend in deep need. There is an 
advantage in keeping clean quite aside from the 



io6 Americans of To-day and To-morrow 

beatitude of moral cleanliness. Strength, purity, 
wisdom — these words comprehend the sum of the 
elementally needful. Yet all men, from philoso- 
pher to plowman, from statesman to chemist, 
have learned that strength and purity and wisdom 
come from some great fountain of those qualities 
quite beyond ourselves. The greatest man in 
American contemporary legislative life — a man 
of ripe years and the seerlike quality of them — • 
one of the real pillars of the republic, as Burke 
would describe him — says the Lord's Prayer 
every night as a child might. No matter whether 
he gets his strength or purity or wisdom in that 
Avay or not, the fact remains that he is strong 
and pure and wise. On the contrary, quite the 
most brilliant and forceful personality that has 
developed in American politics in the last quarter 
of a century has already burned out and is one 
of the ''dark stars" circling through the orbit of 
our political system. ''Is there an after life?" 
asked this man. "No," said he, answering his 
own question. "God is a myth. Religion is a 
vague fancy like the grotesque imaginings of 
childhood.'' It is not said that this mental atti- 
tude had to do with the moral decadence that set 



Our Place and Purpose 107 

in upon this fine character. The fact alone is 
noted. Where a successful man of affairs is 
known to be a sincerely religious man the respect 
which his fellows feel for his abilities is gilded 
with a sort of brightness. It is not uncommon 
for the heads of the great twentieth-century cor- 
porations (which are constantly searching for 
strong young men to enter their service) to in- 
quire whether a subject of examination is 
religious or the reverse; and it counts distinctly 
in his favor if he is the former. 

Instances of this kind can be told to you by 
any man well acquainted with the methods of 
modern ''commercialism'' — bad a name as this 
modern "commercialism'' has secured for itself. 
There is a certain political leader who makes as 
careful selection of his lieutenants over his state 
as a general would make in choosing men and 
officers for a desperate enterprise, and an unvary- 
ing inquiry which this ''boss" makes concerning 
new men whom he is gradually working into the 
"organization" is as to their church standing in 
their own community. All of which proves that 
your boss in politics and your promoter in busi- 
ness value the asset of moral qualities and 



io8 Americans of To-day and To-morrozv 

weigh with the fine scales of experienced judg- 
ment the rehgions character of the men with 
whom they propose to work. 

The most insincere man of ambition will pub- 
licly profess his regard for religion and devo- 
tion to ideals. Who has not heard such a one 
speak before the people with the enthusiasm of 
well-affected unction? It disgusts us? Yes! 
But it should not turn us from the virtue and 
helpful quality of that very thing which the in- 
sincere one seeks insincerely to use. Because 
men use words foully or falsely is no reason why 
conversation should be prohibited. The bad uses 
of anything are, after all, a proof and negative 
measure of the good uses of that same thing. 
Let not cant, therefore, or the deserved repul- 
sion which the misuse of this all-powerful and 
all-uplifting quality of human character works in 
us, destroy our appreciation of its ennobling ben- 
efits or prevent us, as individuals or as a nation 
from cultivating it with simplicity and sincerity. 
David did many things which he ought not to 
have done, and many things in the doing of 
which he appears not to have known what he 
was about; but he knew what he was about 



Out Place and Purpose 109 

when he wrote the Psahns; so did Solomon 
when he wrote the Proverbs; and so did that 
Odier One when he gave to the world not only 
our code of daily living but the statutes also of 
our higher life. 

We are not here indulging in individual ad- 
vice to individuals; we are merely presenting 
fundamental elements of national character and 
noting the effect of their operation. A final word 
will illumine like a burning electric arc at mid- 
night this whole phase of American character in 
the relation of the republic with the rest of the 
world. That word is this : Nations that are 
sturdily religious command the respect of every 
oi-je of us more than those with whose name we 
associate absence of faith. Compare England 
and Germany, on the one hand, with France and 
China on the other hand. It is not said that 
France is irreligious or weak or akin in charac- 
teristics to that oriental chaos we call the Chinese 
Empire; it is not said that England and Ger- 
many are better than Europe's great republic; it 
is said merely that, rightly or wrongly, we have 
come to associate the names of England and 
Germany with a sound and tough religious faith 



iiO' Americans of To-day and To-morrozv 

and France with the reverse ; and our minds, in- 
fluenced by this opinion, conceive Germany and 
England as being stronger, surer, better pur- 
posed and more formidable. 

Or let us project ourselves upon the canvas, 
and imagine ourselves to be citizens of other na- 
tions; and then, standing and looking at our- 
selves, let us ask ourselves how we should look 
on the American republic, viewing it as unsym- 
pathetic and critical foreigners, if all our churches 
were destroyed and all religion extinct among us. 
Should we regard the United States as strong a 
power as we should if we beheld it as it is, sown 
with pulpits and saturated with religious senti- 
ment? The plain answer to these questions will 
demonstrate the value of these qualities of our 
national character. We shall thus see how ripe 
with worth is that regulated faith in and de- 
pendence upon the universal Power. We shall 
thus see that without it our unweighable might 
could work destruction in human affairs like the 
undirected and resistless folly of an unmoral 
giant. And so we come to the consciousness 
that out of our situation and the elements of our 
being, as was stated in the beginning of this 



Our Place and Purpose iii 

chapter, arises the necessity for and, therefore, 
the presence of, the rehgious element in Ameri- 
can character. 

This republic is no vagrant nation. The 
American people are no aimless marauders. 
Their banner floats over no pirate craft, portless 
and doomed. They are no purposeless builders 
of a meaning-less destiny. They obey divine di- 
rections and feel that they do. The stars of 
their flag are fixed stars. They are doing hu- 
manity's work — fulfilling God's mission for them 
— and they know that they are. There is, in the 
progress of the American people through his- 
tory, in their connected and intelligent work in 
the world and for it, a sure faith, a high stability, 
a conservatism of righteousness, a permanence 
and durability of noble achievement. "Glorious 
deeds and lasting results inspired by glorious 
faith and purposes enduring as the everlasting 
hills" — let this be the final word which the gray 
chronicler of the rise and decline of nations shall 
write, a thousand years from now, when clos- 
ing his review of the American people, their 
work and their place in history. 



THE AMERICAN TYPE 



8— Am. T. T. 



CHAPTER VI 
The American Type 



<t^np^HE American t3^pe has not arrived," said 
J^ an observant member of the English 
House of Commons, who has divided 
his time between statecraft and a study of the 
characteristics of peoples. The republic is like 
some vast crucible into which the High Power 
of the universe is still pouring various ingre- 
dients and compounding them with the pestle of 
events and the years. Now this Great Chemist 
of the ages pours in an element of unmixed 
Teuton blood; again, He adds a quantity of 
Italian blood; anon a dash of Slav and French. 
At another time it is Norse blood; pretty con- 
tinuously He adds quantities of Celt, as repre- 
sented by the Irish and Scotch ; and mixing all 
with the great basis of Anglo-Saxon, the pestle 
goes round and round in the process of reducing 
the whole to a homogeneous mass. 

Though the work is not yet finished, though 
the colors of the original ingredients are not yet 

115 



ii6 Americans of To-day and To-morrow 

entirely blended, there begins to be a uniformity 
even in this early hour of our national youth. 
Fundamental characteristics have already been 
noted. Let us observe, now, some of the minor 
qualities which are already emerging. 

It will be found that each one of these, like 
the elemental characteristics, grows out of our 
peculiar situation and condition. Make the fol- 
lowing experiment : Read the paper of any city 
you may chance to be in for a week. Before 
the week is ended you will see announcement that 
some organization, some society, is holding its 
general convention there. To-day it is some 
secret organization like the Masons, or the Odd 
Fellows, or the Knights of Pythias and the like; 
to-morrow it will be some commercial organiza- 
tion like lumber dealers, cattle raisers, carriage 
builders. Everybody knows of the activity of 
manufacturers' associations; and the great labor 
bodies are real powers in the world of industry. 
The musicians of America hold annually a well- 
attended convention. The commercial travelers 
have an organization of almost military solidar- 
ity. A committee representing the southern cot- 
ton spinners recently called on a public man to 



The American Type iiy 

address them .at their annual convention; and 
no body of business men ''convenes" oftener than 
the bankers of the several states. And political 
conventions are a thing of perpetual occurrence. 
''The organization" is a momentous thing to the 
political worker, and rightly. 

In short, your American is an organizer. He 
is gregarious. He must get together. He must 
reduce his activities to system. The switchmen 
of our railroads must have their lodges, officers 
and discipline. So must our mine workers. This 
tendency to organize among the American peo- 
ple is not a temporary passion. It is a trait of 
our character. It is a law of cohesion which 
our kindly destiny has set in motion to hold us 
together. It is useful that, in a republic, this 
should be so. A monarchy might well do with- 
out it, because the minute and rigid organization 
of the monarchy of itself absorbs the organizing 
ability of the people and renders their voluntary 
organization unnecessary. But our government 
is the people itself. May it not be that loyalty 
to the republic might possibly be an indiscrimi- 
nate and idealistic passion, to be talked about in 
the club or at the fireside rather than acted upon, 



Ii8 Americans of To-day and To-morrow 

were it not, perhaps, for the fact that our in- 
dustrial and social constitution itself compels lit- 
tle organizations among- us, and therefore loyalty 
to those little organizations? And is there not 
thus begotten in us a loyalty to the great central 
organization called our government which has its 
roots in the very depths of our being? Astonish- 
ing is the fervor manifested by college men in 
adherence to their Greek letter fraternities and 
affection for their emblems. It is even more 
curious to note the enthusiasm of full-grown men 
of experience and affairs for some secret order 
they belong to and their peculiar attachment to 
the emblem of their order ; it is to them more 
important and significant than any family heir- 
loom handed down through g'enerations. But 
by the same token this intense and, to some, al- 
most eccentric interest of sane and effective men 
in little organizations and the insignia thereof 
all focuses in a large devotion to country and 
flag. All of the little organizations are schools 
of discipline for citizenship in the big organiza- 
tion. All are training ships for the great ship 
of state. When an organization is not this — 
when the first principle of it is not loyalty to 



The American Type 119 

the government — it is poisonous and deserves 
extermination. 

We are now so welded together by common 
interests and so well trained in system that de- 
struction of the government is quite impossible. 
Take a startling and impossible example : Sup- 
pose our Constitution should to-morrow by some 
miracle be withdrawn from the memory of man 
and all our high officials be paralyzed — still, as 
a matter of actual happening, there would be no 
continuous governmental chaos, no permanent 
business paralysis, no lasting disturbance- of so- 
ciety. Our habits of orderly procedure would 
propel us forward with system and purpose. For 
order in home, church, industry, business, even 
in amusements, is a quality of the American char- 
acter. It has evolved out of the nature of things. 

For we have been left to ourselves; and sys- 
tem, which Peter the Great found it necessary to 
force upon the Slav, has sprung spontaneously 
out of our necessities. 

Your American is profoundly in earnest. He 
takes himself seriously, and he has good reason 
to. He feels that he is executing a commission, 
the terms and directions of which have not been 



I20 Americans of To-day and To-morrow 

written by human hands nor devised by human 
wisdom. But, for all that, he is no gloomy 
knight of heaven. He is no somber egotist of 
destiny. Convinced that his purposes are the 
very highest sent to any people, and that his 
success is as certain as any appointed event of 
nature, he looks kindly on the world and on him- 
self. The phenomena of events yield him the 
fruit of humor as well as of duty. No analyst 
can call him gay — it is too light a word to de- 
scribe the feeling back of his mehow laughter. 
But he carries off his mission with light-hearted- 
ness. There is a vein of happiness in his grim- 
mest purpose. 

It is useful for the student of American char- 
acter to visit occasionally the high-class places 
of public amusement. You will observe that the 
audience is as vital, as full-blooded, as English- 
men were in the days when the "roast beef of 
old England" served to describe British char- 
acter. Yet there is mirth among them. Your 
American enjoys his jest. In the orderly on- 
going of his life, in the serious and creative walk 
of his daily affairs, he finds it necessary to have 
the funny, the eccentric, even the bizarre, to 



il 



The American Type 121 

keep the industry of his Hfe from breaking its 
own machinery, just as the safety valve is a 
necessity in a boiler to prevent its explosion. 
Witness the curious and otherwise inexplicable 
spread, in all our Sunday newspapers, of queer 
and ridiculous colored supplements filled with 
nonsense pictures. And observe that gray heads 
feed upon them with the avidity of children. 

Thus we see that the harp of our national 
character has among its strings the chord of 
humor which the Great Player constantly touches ; 
and so is added to the music of our national ex- 
istence a kindly liveliness which makes the strains 
of the whole composition attractive. And it is 
well that it is so; for on such an exalted scale 
is that composition pitched, so full of the solid 
and noble is it, that it would be splendidly mo- 
notonous but for the note of happiness and joy 
which recurs again and again. The American 
mind takes in a thing very quickly. We are the 
nation of telephones, telegraphs, high speed, in- 
stant despatch. We do things quickly. We see 
things quickly. We solve the problem while 
slower peoples are comprehending what the prob- 
lem really is. 



122 Americans of To-day and To-morrozu 

So when a proposition is stated we arrive at 
our conclusion and move on to the next. When 
a joke is uttered we have our laugh; but let the 
humorist beware how he repeats it — no squeezed 
oranges for us. We have enormous powers of 
mental digestion and we consume the fruit of 
life and circumstance with rapidity. We build 
some mighty structure — we accomplish some 
mighty feat. We have no time for self-admira- 
tion. What can we do better? is the question. 
And we answer that question by immediately 
doing something better. And so the impatience 
of American character is no illegitimate offspring. 
It is no exotic growth. It is quite a natural thing 
and has the good uses pointed out. But its dan- 
gers cannot be denied. And the conservatism 
and thoroughness of American character must 
prevent American impatience from spoiling the 
permanence and beneficence of our work in the 
world and history; and humor must make our 
life and effort tolerable. 

It is curious to note the recurrence of racial 
characteristics in national life. With all our mix- 
ture the base is, in the broad sense, Teutonic. 



The American Type 123 

And all people of this blood have been rulers, 
governors, administrators. They seem to have 
the faculty of administrative control over other 
peoples. They have, too, the instinct of territorial 
acquisition. Go deeper than the thought of any 
American, Englishman or German, and the voice 
that will speak to you from his instinct will say 
that the world is his inheritance. "The Earth is 
the Lord's and the Fulness Thereof" is the quo- 
tation over the stock exchange in London. 
"Yes," said a witty F'renchman reading it, "but 
these Englishmen think they are the representa- 
tives of the Lord. And what they mean is that 
the earth is the Englishman's and the fulness 
thereof." The young woman in Canada who 
painted the English flag with a bulldog standing 
by it and the inscription, "What we have we 
hold," struck a responsive chord in the British 
breast. 

The envious laugh at the Emperor of Ger- 
many. "But," said a great German merchant, 
"say what you will, the emperor is the most 
popular man in Germany because in his foreign 
enterprises he represents the instinct of our Ger- 
man millions." Toward the end of the Spanish 



124 Americans of To-day and To-morrozv 

War, when the question of holding the PhiUp- 
pines was the proposition of the hour, the writer 
attended a great meeting of the party in opposi- 
tion. A powerful orator spoke against holding 
the Philippines. In the audience were many hun- 
dreds of workingmen. Three sat very near the 
front. They still had on their blouses; they 
were still fresh from the factory. Also, they 
were ardent members of the opposition party. 
Vigorously they applauded all of the old-time 
sentiments against the party in power. But when 
the speaker began his attack upon the policy of 
holding the Philippines one of them said to 
another : 

'There's where I don't agree with him." 

''No," responded the other. 'T say keep every 
inch of them." 

"Yes, that's my sentiment," said the third. 
''Get all you can and keep all you get." 

"That's it," said the first of the three laboring 
men. "That's the doctrine. If our party goes 
against that, there's where I quit them." 
^ This conversation was typical. Who that was 
raised in the country has not known an old 
farmer possessed of broad acres enough for him- 



ti 



The American Type 125 

self and also enough to give a good farm to each 
of his children. Who has not known this old 
American farmer to keep adding to his posses- 
sions, and even to mortgage what he already has 
to secure additions to his surplus holdings ? Why 
does he do it? He could not tell you. Nobody 
could tell you. He does it because the blood 
within him compels him to do it. He does it 
for the same reason that the bird flies southward 
on the approach of winter and northward on the 
approach of spring. He obeys a racial instinct. 
In short, one element of American character is 
territorial acquisitiveness. 

There is no use in wasting energy or time de- 
bating whether that is a good thing or a bad 
thing. It is so. And if it is. so, it is so for a 
good reason. The Great Maker of us did not 
create this instinct without a purpose. 

Great floods in the West, a few years ago, 

'aroused the iympathies of the nation. Offers of 

help were telegraphed to devastated communities. 

The reply of one was characteristic of the rest : 

"We thank you for your generosity, but we 
need no help. We can take care of ourselves." 

That answer reveals an American character- 



126 Americans of To-day and To-morrozu 

istic — pride. We are, perhaps, the proudest of 
peoples. Undoubtedly it arises from our national 
doctrine and habit of depending on ourselves 
and winning our own way. We are a nation of 
farmers who have made their own farms, of 
manufacturers who have built their own factories. 
Self-reliance has been preached from our pulpits 
and taught from the desks of our schoolrooms 
and reiterated by our great instructor, Necessity. 
From the first it was considered disgraceful (and 
was so) for an American not to be able to take 
care of himself and those depending upon him. 
"It is still so, and let us pray (and strive, as well 
as pray) that it always may be so. Hence, our 
pride — the child of our peculiar personal inde- 
pendence. 

Hence, too, our generosity. We are called 
the most egotistical of nations, but are we not 
entitled to our egotisms? Is there a contempo- 
raneous people (or does history tell us of any 
nation that lived in the past) who on the one 
hand is so masterful and on the other hand so 
cares for suffering, for want? We appropriated 
$200,000 to help the afflicted survivors of the 
Martinique disaster; whereas France, to which 



The American Type i2y 

Martinique belongs, found a constitutional ob- 
jection in the way of a like appropriation. We 
sent a shipload of provisions to starving Ireland. 
Let fire, flood, drought or famine ; let epidemic, 
disease or any form of misfortune befall any 
portion of our republic, and the brotherhood 
within us becomes active and furnishes shelter, 
food, medicine, cash, prayers, tears, and every 
form of tangible aid and tender sympathy where 
needed. 

It is personal contact with life's actualities that 
makes the American people intolerant of frauds. 
A foreign critic of us, in a book published some 
dozen years ago, said that we are mercurial in 
temperament, liable to gusts of enthusiasm, ca- 
pricious in affections and dislikes. He observed 
that we were swept off our feet by an agitation 
one year and that a precisely contrary agitation 
equally swept us off our feet the next year. From 
the surface his observation was accurate; but he 
did not examine the whole texture and constitu- 
tion of American character. A certain impetu- 
osity of massed conviction is discernible in 
political and religious movements in this country. 
Yet that impetuosity has never yet failed to yield 



128 Americans of To-day and To-morroz 



w 



to the most influential counselor to whom the 
American people ever listens, Old Father Second 
Thought. That we are hasty cannot be denied, 
but we are fortunate in the habit of pounding 
right on at a proposition until it is finally finished. 

''A fault I find with your republic is that it 
encourages among the people love of notoriety," 
said an intelligent observer of our institutions. 
And who does not remember the Frenchman's 
book on American character issued anonymously 
nine or ten years ago? Every now and then the 
papers have bristled with stinging criticism from 
certain European writers upon the American love 
of the tawdry and vainglorious. Surface observa- 
tion seems to justify their painful statements. If 
more careful analysis confirms surface observa- 
tions, it is the most distressing fact of American 
development. 

But I do not find it to be true. The man of 
gold lace, the attitude maker, the "grand-stand 
player" (how apt, after all, is our slang!) elicits 
the attention but not the respect of our Ameri- 
can masses. Our tendencies are less and less 
toward the notorious. Bombastes Furioso can 
get no American audience to-day; whereas, a 



The Anicrican Type J2g 

quarter of a century ago his tinsel and sound 
attracted mightily. And who has not observed 
in recent years instances of the deadly effect which 
strut in a man's character has upon American 
opinion — that, too, even though the man be of 
excellent abilities with a record of uncommon 
service to the republic? On the whole, the 
ponderer upon American social phenomena must 
admit that our tendencies are toward the simple 
and sincere in speech, instead of toward the 
grandiose and pretentious; toward the quiet in 
ceremony, instead of the ostentatious ; and so on. 
throughout all the manifestations of American 
character. 

For example, do we not all know that any 
American speaker or lecturer would be laughed 
at who used to-day the rhetoric of Burke; that 
the Hit of even Macaulay's rich style and the 
ponderous magnificence of Gibbon are tolerated 
only because of the real merit of much of their 
matter? Or, suppose to-day that an American 
President were to ride in a gilded coach with 
caparisoned horses, footmen and all the other 
spectacular accouterments which Washington is 
said to have used; would not the American 

9— Am. T. T. 



1 30' Americans of To-day and To-morrozv 

electorate reject such a President, even if he were 
conceded to be the very ablest statesman and the 
most distinguished soldier the republic has yet 
produced ? Or vv^ould not the equally ostentatious 
simplicity of Jefferson, who rode horseback from 
the White House to the Capitol and tied his horse 
with his own hands to a post, be received with 
equal condemnation and for the same reasons? 

Your American does not like the vulgar ad- 
vertisement of a public man riding long journeys 
in a common railway coach when he can afford 
to ride in a chair car; and your American also 
equally resents the conduct of the public man 
who goes to the other extreme. For your 
American wants the genuine. 

In all of this I discern in American character 
a subcurrent of the moderate. (Never mind the 
surface eddies — mark only the real flow of the 
stream.) There is among our masses a predilec- 
tion for the simple. Were this not so we should 
feel despair for American institutions and 
America's future. With all our fervency of dis- 
position, with all our intensity of purpose, w^ith 
all our enthusiasm of manner, we are still, in the 



The American Type 131 

great bulk, a nation of plodders. And thank 
Heaven that this is so ! The fable of the tortoise 
and the hare has disappeared from our school 
books, but not from our current American folk 
talk. Walk, having ears to hear, among the 
people, and note their expressions. ^'Don't count 
your chickens before they are hatched," said a 
school urchin to an imaginative companion the 
other day — thus showing that in his home this 
pungent saying of Anglo-Saxon caution ex- 
pressed the conservative wisdom of his family 
in 1908 as much as it did a hundred years ago. 
How interesting if some one who has the time 
would pick up and publish the sayings of the man 
in the field and forge and mine, of the woman 
about her household! All of them would be 
words of conservative wisdom. They would 
show that American life is the simple Hfe. And 
doubt not that the simple life is the only life 
worth living. 

The unkind observations of foreign critics and 
the superficial analysis of quick writers here at 
home are due to the eccentricities of a small class 
of the over-rich and the quickly rich, of neurotic 
public men who appeal by the methods of the 



132 Americans of To-day and To-morrow 

bizarre and the brazen, and of like clumps and 
coteries of foolish people among us. But all of 
these classes put together are practically unap- 
preciable in the great make-up of American 
character. 

If some supreme analyst of character could 
make a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 
American traits he would hardly mention the 
faring classes among the American millions. In 
such an analysis he would scarcely set them down 
opposite the words "a trace." 

Of course, it is not thought that analysis of 
American characteristics has been exhausted ; no 
doubt an inventory of them has only been sug- 
gested in these pages. For American character 
is like the sea — fathomless and all-abound- 
ing, and revealing to science new wonders 
and riches; or like the heavens on clear and 
starry nights that discover to each new tele- 
scope of higher power new possibilities beyond. 
Defects we have — yes ; mistakes we have 
made — certainly. Who believes the American 
people perfect? Surely, not the American peo- 
ple themselves. 



The American Type 133 

But we do declare that we are making earnest 
efforts toward perfection. 

We do assert that American character, on 
the whole, is sweet and wholesome and generous 
and high-purposed. 

We do proclaim that we will make each year 
better than the last, each generation nobler than 
its fathers. 

We do assert that each epoch of our history 
shows the flag planted a day's march onward 
and that the march will continue. 

And, for proof of these claims, we Americans 
appeal to chronicle and to contemporary event; 
and, most of all, to the historian of the future. 

[the end] 



THE BIBLE AS GOOD READING 

By ALBERT J. BEVERIDGE 
United States Senator from Indiana 

Both as an appreciation and a guide, this book is a 
spur to him who has neglected his Bible, a gratification 
to him who has not. How many of us ever think of the 
Bible just as good reading? How many of us ever take 
the trouble to compare it with the novels, for instance, 
that we read? Senator Beveridge makes just such a 
study, and shows that, considered merely as interesting read- 
ing, the Bible is the monarch of all books. 

Cloth, 50 cents; ooze calf, boxed, $1.00. 

WORK AND HABITS 

By ALBERT J. BEVERIDGE 
United States Senator from Indiana 

A book to make men — a sinewy book, a book that will 
put spirit into the clay. 

Senator Beveridge rendered a great service to the young 
manhood of the country in presenting this vade mecum 
to them. The book is luminous rather than voluminous. 
It is a pocketbook with this advantage, that the wealth it 
carries only increases with spending. 

Cloth, 50 cents; ooze calf, boxed, $1.00. 

AMERICANS OF TO-DAY and TO-MORROW 

By ALBERT J. BEVERIDGE 
United States Senator from Indiana 

Senator Beveridge has a singularly happy mofle of 
writing — an intimate, anecdotal style that makes even the 
weightier problems of national polity agreeable, and not 
too heavy, reading. The author does not find every Ameri- 
can trait so perfect as to regard a word of warning or of 
criticism as little better than high treason. Indeed, he 
makes us see ourselves as others see us. 

Cloth, 50 cents; ooze calf, boxed, $1.00. 

HENRY ALTEMUS COMPANY 
PHILADELPHIA 



AUG 27 "1908 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



oooDHvaa^vfl « 



